A 




.C7 



THE WORKS 

OF 

FULKE GREVILLE 

A THESIS 
By morris W. CROLL 



IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE 

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE 

OF 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 



o 



aniDcr^itp of ^ennjBfplbania 

1901 



PHILADELPHIA 
PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

I 903 



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P7 






THE 
WORKS OF FULKE GREVILLE 



I 

THE SONNET-SEQUENCE CJELICJ 

The beginning of the history of Greville's literary work is in some 
lines of a Pastoral by Sidney called Dispraise of a Courtly Life, 

Well was I, while vnder shade 
Oaten reedes me musicke made; 
Striuing with my mates in song, 
Mixing mirth our songs among. 

— a marginal note on the manuscript of this poem telling us that the 
mates referred to are Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville.^ The poem 
was probably written at some time during the years 1578 and 1579, 
when we know that Sidney was chafing bitterly at his enforced idleness 
at the court. The fraternity of the three young men to which it alludes 
was probably formed during the years 1568-71, when they were all 
at college, Sidney and Dyer at Oxford, Greville at Cambridge ; and it 
may be assumed that the writing of verses was one of the amusements 
with which they adorned their college companionship. But in the years 
following, their association was principally in foreign travel and diplo- 
macy, and it was not until Sidney began in 1576-7 the life of a courtier, 
with its quieter intervals of country retirement, that they had leisure 
to strive with one another in song under the shade of the groves of 
Wilton and Penshurst. In the years following, from 1577 to 1583, 
Sidney produced all of the works that we possess from his pen, and it 
is reasonable to suppose that during all of that period Greville was 
sharing with him in his literary amusements as in virtually all of his 
other activities. The question whether or not any of the poems in 
Caelica are the results of this early writing can only be decided by a 
careful study of the sequence, and the only verse not included in Caelica 
that has been supposed to have been written by Greville before Sidney's 

^This is one of two similar poems, celebrating the friendship of Dyer, 
Greville and Sidney, first published in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. See The 
Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, Boston, 1860, and The Complete 
Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. by Dr. Grosart, 1877, Vol. II, p. 32. 

3 



4 The Works of Fulke Greville 

death, namely, the poem beginning "In youth when I at large did 
leade," published in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1578) and signed 
" F. Gr.," is certainly not by Greville.^ 

The outward record of Greville's early literary life not only begins 
but ends with these lines from Sidney's Pastoral, unless there is evi- 
dence, as most writers have thought, that Greville was a member of the 
famous " Areopagus" club. This subject requires some attention. All 
the writers who discuss this shadowy institution include Greville's 
name among its members, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Lee,- Mr. Symonds,^ Mrs. 
Ward,'' Dr. Grosart,^ and more recently Dr. Spingarn.^ Mr. Gosse, 
who alone gives a reason for doing so, quotes as evidence the lines from 
Sidney's Pastoral just given ; ^ but if there is nothing more than this 
to support Greville's claim, it must be given up at once. For there is 
surely enough of rhymed verse in the Arcadia to indicate that Sidney 
may have striven with his mates without imposing the restrictions of 
quantitative verse as one of the rules of the competition. 

There is, in fact, no evidence that Greville either practised or ap- 
proved unrhymed classical metres in English. The references on which 
the history of the Areopagus depends are in the letters of Spenser and 
Harvey published as Two other verie commendable Letters. Both 
Harvey and Spenser mention the club by name. Harvey's words are : 
"Your new-formed apuovnayov I honoure more than you will or can 
suppose : and make greater accompte of the twoo worthy gentlemenne, 
than of the two hundredth Dionysii Areopagitae, or the verie notablest 
senatours, that ever Athens dydde affourde of that number." « Spenser 

^ Printed by Grosart — though he did not believe in Greville's authorship — 
with his Minor Poems; Vol. II, pp. 140-3. The edition of Greville's works by 
Grosart in four volumes, 1870, of which only 156 copies were printed, is the 
only form in which Greville's works are generally accessible. I have had the 
benefit of a comparison with the first edition both of the Folio of 1633 (con- 
taining Caelica, the plays, the treatises of "Humane Learning," "Fame and 
Honor," and " Warres," etc. ) , and of The Remains of Sir Fulk Greville, 1670 
(containing the treatises of "Monarchy" and of "Religion"). There is a copy 
of the former in the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, and of the 
latter in the Philadelphia Library. The other original edition is of the Life of 
Sidney, 1652, and I have compared this also with Grosart's edition, in a copy 
owned by myself. 

== Diet, of Nat. Biog. s. n. Greville. 

' Life of Sidney, English Men of Letters series, p. 73. 

* English Poets, Vol. 1. 

^ His edition of the Poetical Works of Sidney, 1, p. Ixxv. 

• Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, New York, 1899, p. 300. 

^His statement is particularly misleading. He says: "Almost the only 
reference to the famous Areopagus includes their names [Dyer's and Gre- 
ville's]." Sir Philip Sidney, Contemporary Review, 1, p. 642. 

" Grosart's edition of Harvey, Vol. 1, p. 20. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 5 

says : " As for the twoo worthy Gentlemen, Master Sidney and Master 
Dyer, they haue me, I thanke them, in some vse of familiarity: . . . 
And nowe they have proclaimed in their d.petwndj'u) a general sur- 
ceasing and silence of balde Rymers, and also of the verie beste to : in 
steade whereof, they haue, by authoritie of their whole Senate, pre- 
scribed certaine Lawes and rules of Quantitie of English sillables for 
English Verse."' ^ 

There is no mention here of Greville; and, on the contrary, two 
of the well-known triad, all poets, are chosen for distinct mention to 
the exclusion of the third. We look for other evidence on the subject 
to Greville's own poems, and we find there but one trace of the influence 
of the classical movement. Sonnet 6 in Caelica is an echo in form and 
substance of the seven stanzas of " Saphikes" sung by Zelmane in the 
First Book of Arcadia; ^ but it is curious that in this single case where 
Greville has used a classical metre he has added rhyme to it.' It is 
evident at least that Greville did not share the dislike of " barbarous 
rhyming" that distinguished the more ardent hexametrists. But there 
are further indications of his position. In 1603 Campion renewed the 
controversy in his Observations on the Art of English Poesie, the last 
attack of the classical metrists, and was answered at once by Daniel 
in A Defence of Ryme, which appeared in the same year.* In a prefa- 
tory address " To All the Worthy Lovers and Learned Professors of 
Kyme, within his Maiesties Dominions," Daniel says: 

Worthy Gentlemen, about a year since, upon the great reproach given to 
the Professors of Rj-me, and the use thereof, I wrote a private letter, as a 
defence of mine owne undertakings in that kinde, to a learned Gentleman a 
great friend of mine, then in Court. Which I did, rather to confirme my selfe 
in mine owne courses, and to hold him from being wonne from us, then with 
any desire to publish the same to the world. 

The correspondent to whom Daniel thus refers is, on the authority 
of the editors of this work, Greville, and it is to be presumed that the 
first edition contains some authority marginal or other, for this iden- 
tification.'* Daniel's words are not decisive on the point, but they seem 
to show that Greville was in fact one of the " Lovers and Learned 

^ Grosart's edition of Harvey, Vol. 1, p. 7. 

' 1633 ed. of Arcadia, Book 1, p. 78. 

' In the Third Book of Arcadia there is a rhymed poem of apparently the 
same form, but in fact the lines are the regular English five-stressed iambics, 
abab. 

*Hazlewood, Ancient Critical Essays, London, 1811, Vol. II. 

'I have not been able to see Grosart's ed.. Vol. IV, where I suppose the 
facts are given. The editors to whom I refer are Hazlewood and Mr. Ernest 
Ehys, editor of Literary Pamphlets ( Vol. I ) . 



6 The Works of Fulke Greville 

Professors of Eyme." There is another record of this correspondence 
besides Daniel's mention of his own letter, showing that Greville also 
took part in the discussion. The article on Greville in the Biographia 
Britannica, of 1757, a careful and excellent biography and the source 
of much later writing on the subject, contains the following : 

Between whom (Daniel and Sir Fulk Greville) there passed an intercourse 
of several letters, upon some improvements or reformation that had been pro- 
posed to be made, in the masques, interludes, or other dramatical entertainments 
at Court. . . . Their sentiments they also exchanged in writing, upon the topic 
of our English versification, about the time that Daniel had his controversy 
with Campion thereupon, and Sir Fulk's judgment is often applauded, with 
his munificence to several practitioners therein.^ 

This affords no clue to Greville's position, but we have the evidence 
both of his ordinary practise and of his theory of poetry to show that 
he probably always followed the poetic forms in which he found least 
resistance to the difficult and weighty things he had to say, and if his 
letters should be recovered they would most likely show the same indif- 
ference to the relative merits of the two sides of the controversy that 
he shows in the case of the two systems of astronomy. At all events 
there is nothing to prove that he took part in the proposed reform of 
English versifying. 

To the external evidence concerning Greville's literary activity, 
might be added, if they were not so vague and confusing, various state- 
ments, made long after, as to the time of the composition of his works. 
Greville himself, in his Life of Sidney, written not long before his 
death, calls his collected poems "the exercises of my youth," but the 
collection to which he referred was to contain the Treatise of Monarchy, 
which, as we shall see, was probably not written before Greville's fiftieth 
year. Similar statements were made by Davenant - and by the pub- 
lisher of the 1670 volume, with the further mention of a revision by 
Greville of all his works later in his life; and the title page of the 
1633 Folio is more definite still; it describes the poems as "Written 
in his Youth, and familiar Exercise with sir Philip Sidney." These 
latter words, however, which have been taken too seriously, are of 
course the work of the publisher, and are due to the confusion of two 
neighboring phrases of Greville's own in the passage quoted from 

>Vol. IV, p. 2400, note K. The writer of the article, who had evidently 
seen these letters, gives as the reference for them : " A Miscellany of Historical 
and Poetical Remarks, gathered in the reign of King James 1, 4to among the 
MSS. of the late Thomas Coxeter, Esq." Mr. J. A. Herbert, of the Dep't of 
MSS. in the British Museum, writes to me that the Coxeter MS. is not there. 

'That is, according to Aubrey. Brief Lives, ed. by Andrew Clark, 1898, 1, 
p. 204. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 7 

above. ^ In view of the doubtful meaning of all such statements, we 
must leave the discussion of the date of the works to the sections in 
which we shall speak of them separately. 

I 

The sequence called Caelica consists of one hundred and ten poems, 
of which the first eighty express the love of the poet for a mistress 
whom he calls Caelica, Myra, or Cynthia, as his fancy directs, but in 
the latter part of which he writes, as Habington does in the latter part 
of his Castara, only on general and impersonal themes. It is remark- 
able for the fact that about one-half of the so-called sonnets are in 
other than the regular fourteen-line form, for the unevenness of the 
merit of the various poems, and because the sonnet is used in this 
sequence for purposes to which it was turned by no other poet during 
its Elizabethan flourishing. For all these reasons it has attracted the 
attention of the critics, but the general expressions of interest or 
amazement which its peculiar qualities have inspired have been mingled 
with uncertainty as to its date, errors as to the subject-matter of the 
poems, misconception of the story involved in it, and misinterpretation 
of its true literary significance. One instance of the general uncer- 
tainty will serve for illustration. Mr. Gosse, treating Greville in his 
Jacobean Poets, says : " His existing works appear to belong, in the 
main, to the post-Elizabethan period ; the cycle of Caelica, which seems 
to date from the close of the sixteenth century, being excepted;"* 
and Mr. Courthope probably holds the same opinion, since he has 
nothing to say of Greville in his latest volume, though he writes 
in full of Sidney, Dyer, Raleigh, and Essex, his fellow courtier-poets. 
But Mrs. Ward, on the other hand, writes of his works as of Sid- 
ney's time, relying on the title-page of 1633 ; ' while Professor Schel- 
ling, though classifying his selections from Greville with those from 
Sidney, expresses the opinion that " Caelica exhibits very decidedly 
... a deepening maturity of mind, and may have been written 
through a series of years." * The contradictions, however, with what- 
ever errors are involved in them, are not in this case, or in some other 
similar ones, due to carelessness. They are due largely to absence of 
evidence and to the fact that Greville's works have never been sub- 



* He says (Life of Sidney, Gr. ed., IV, p. 5) : " Which I ingenuously con- 
fesse, to be one chief motive of dedicating these exercises of my youth to that 
Worthy, Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed." 

' Jacobean Poets, New York, 1894, p. 196. 

* Ward's English Poets, I. 

* Elizabethan Lyrics, Athenaeum Press series, Boston, 1895. 



8 The Works of Fulke Greville 

mitted to a minute investigation.^ It is only by a careful study of the 
poems themselves and the internal evidence they afford that the mate- 
rial for an intelligent study of Greville can be obtained; and for- 
tunately the results of internal exploration are in the case of Caehca 
more than usually clear and decisive. 

The close relation between Caelica and the poems of bidney is at 
once the most obvious and the most significant fact revealed by such 
an examination. Mrs. Ward has shown that a number of the sonnets 
are " echoes" of sonnets and songs in Astrophel and Stella and suggests 
that the list may be extended.^ The following is a description, as 
nearly complete as possible, of the similarities between individual poems 
in Caelica and individual poems of Sidney in Astrophel and Stella and 
elsewhere, too close to be due to anything but intention on the part of 
one or both of the poets. 

1 Caelica 6, four stanzas in rhymed sapphics, is in direct imitation both of 
the form and the substance of the " Saphikes" sung by Zelmane at the end of 
Book I of Arcadia.' 

2 Caelica 11 and 35 are separate elaborations of two Anacreontic fancies, 
both of which are contained in A and 8. 8. C. 11 represents the strange conse- 
quences of Cupid's banishment north of the Tropic. C. 35 tells of his being 
crippled in his wings by dwelling too long in the cold of Caelica s heart. 

3 Caelica 12 and A. and 8. 65: Cupid a vagabond, taken in and sheltered 
by the lover, who is wounded almost to death by his ungrateful guest. Compare 
especially the first quatrain C. 12 with the second of A. and 8. 65.^ C. 15 is 
a working over of the same device. ^ x- i * -i «« 

4 13 and A and 8. 17. " Two better illustrations of poetical failure on 
the one hand, and such poetical success as the kind of theme admits of on the 
other, could scarcely be brought together than the thirteenth sonnet ot Cael^ca, 
' Cupid his boy's play many times forbidden,' as compared with the :«;ell-known 
'His mother dear Cupid offended late' of Astrophel and 8tella." Mrs. Hum- 
phrey Ward, English Poets, I, Greville. 

5 C 45 and the Tenth Song in A. wnd 8. Though absence i? a common 
theme of nearly every sonnetteer the subtle argument by which the lover ex- 
tracts some sort of satisfaction from absence in these poems and the similarity 
of the metre prove their immediate connection. Sidney's Song is in stanzas 
of six four-stress trochaic lines of seven and eight syllables, rhyming as follows: 
aabccb; Greville's stanza is a b a b cc d eed; so that his poem is also of the 
kind called ' song' by Sidney.* 

^No disparagement of the service of Dr. Grosart in reprinting the poems 
is meant by this statement, since he has professedly undertaken only biography 
and appreciation. 

^ As above. 

' 1633 ed. p. 78. , . , ^. i. 

'The original of this, as of other Cupid-and-Venus fancies, of which some- 
thing is said below, is in the Odes of Anacreon. Greene and Herrick also have 
versions of it. Of course in poems on themes so common only close resemblance 
can determine interrelation. 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 9 

6. C. 46, * Patience, weake-fortuned and weake-minded wit,' " is an exer- 
cise on the same theme as Sonnet 56 of Astrophel and Stella." Mrs. Ward, as 
above. 

7. C. 50 and a similar rude apologue from common life, Arcadia, Bk. 3, 
pp. 390-3 (1633 edition), 'A Neighbour mine not long agoe there was.' These 
poems, so different in their broad and jovial satiricism from anything else in 
these courtly poets, fulfil all the conditions of the medieval fabliau and are to be 
classed as late examples of that species. 

8. C. 60, ' Caelica, you said I doe obscurely live,' and A. and 8. 27, ' Because 
I oft in dark abstracted guise.' This is the only case of close resemblance in 
which Greville has some advantage from comparison, the subtlety and sincerity 
of his thought compensating for his inferiority in form and lightness of fancy. 
The last stanza seems to be a later addition, and not a good one. 

9. C. 76 and the Eighth Song of A. and S. Tlie two poems have in com- 
mon the description of a May landscape, the walk of two lovers through " an 
enamel'd meade" (in Greville), in "a grove most rich of shade" (in Sidney), 
the long silence of both, with nice analysis of their emotions, finally a long 
casuistic dialogue on love, in which the ardor of the lover is restrained by the 
prudence of his mistress, or, in Greville's case, by her anger .^ The metrical form 
is the same, seven-and-eight-syllable trochaic lines rhyming in pairs, except that 
in Sidney's poem throughout couplets of eight-syllable trochaic lines alternate 
regularly with couplets of seven-syllable trochaic lines and thus the stanza 
eflFect is maintained, while in Greville's this regular alternation is observed 
through only about half of the poem. 

This list includes only cases in which one poem is clearly prompted 
by the other. Another at least twice as long could be made of lines, 
quatrains and stanzas in Caelica which have been suggested by Astro- 
phel and Stella. Such a minute comparison is unnecessary, but the 
general similarity of a certain group of sonnets in Caelica to a group 
in Astrophel and Stella is important in determining the relation 
between the two. In each of the following sonnets from A. and S. the 
motive is an elaborate Cupid-device, in the 'Anacreontic' style preva- 
lent in all early Renaissance poetry: 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 43, 65 
(9 sonnets). The similar sonnets in Caelica are: 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 
25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 52, 70, 85 (17 sonnets). All of these 
fall within so small a range of imagery and application that as a class 
they form a marked feature of likeness between the two cycles. 



' Poems following this convention are numerous in later poets. Compare 
Donne's The Ecstacy, Lord Herbert's Ode on a Question moved whether Love 
should continue forever, Wither's Fair-Virtue, The Mistress of Phil'arete, Son- 
net 3. In Donne's poem by a characteristic subtlety the dialogue is reduced 
to a monologue spoken by the undistinguished soul of the two lovers. There 
may be an original in some foreign literature, or Sidney's Song may have sug- 
gested the rest. Sedley shows the abuse of the form in various poems and 
Cartwright protests against the Platonism which found expression in it in his 
No Platonic Love. 



10 The Works of Fulke Greville 

Again, the metrical forms of Caelica are in general derived from 
Sidney. These will be more carefully discussed in the following sec- 
tion, but it is to be noted here that every form prevalent in Caelica is 
to be found either in the Arcadia or in Astrophel and Stella; and this 
is true not only of the regular forms, the sonnet in the form used by 
Surrey and Shakespeare, and the group of two to four sestettes, a b a b 
c c, used for practically the same effect as the sonnet proper and called 
' sonnet,' but also for such variations as ten- or eighteen-line sonnets, 
a succession of ten-line sonnets forming a single poem (Greville's Son- 
net 61 and Sidney's poem, Wo7iders of England^ octettes, and seven- 
and eight- syllable trochaics variously used. 

And finally, there is kinship between the cycles in a certain kind 
of resemblance which will seem accidental only to those who fail to 
take account of the symbolic means by which Greville expressed his 
veneration for Sidney's memory, namely, in their length. Sidney's 
cycle consists of 108 sonnets, not including the songs, which were 
interspersed among the sonnets after the sequence had in other respects 
been given its final form.^ In Caelica^ as reprinted by Dr. Grosart, 
there are 110 sonnets, but in the MS. which Greville left with his final 
corrections the numberings reach to the exact figure 108. This MS., 
which is at Warwick Castle and was sent to Dr. Grosart after his text 
of the Sonnets had appeared, evidently gives the exact form in which 
Greville meant his work to appear; and the difference between the 
number therein and the number in the reprinted form is due to two 
facts: first that the Warwick Castle MS. does not contain Sonnet 6, 
the poem in rhymed sapphics, and that this sonnet was therefore prob- 
ably obtained and added by whoever took charge of the publication 
of the 1633 Folio (which for this reason numbers to 109) ; secondly, 
that in the MS. the same number was used for two contiguous sonnets 
(27 and 28 are both there 27), and this error was perpetuated in the 
1633 edition. If the point were of sufficient importance one could 
gather other minute evidence from the MS. to show that the coin- 
cidence is not due to chance. 

We have considered here only the outward similarities and not 
those which have to do with the spirit of the poems. We may now ask 
what conclusions are to be drawn from the facts presented. In the 
first place, it appears that all of the cases of close resemblance between 
individual sonnets occur in the first half of the Caelica, with the excep- 
tion of Greville's Sonnet 76, and since this is a poem of a particular 
kind, such as Sidney distinguished by the name of songs, it is possible 
that its position is dtie to its having been added to the sequence with 

* A, W. Pollard's ed. of Astrophel and Stella, London, 1898, p. xxxvi. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 11 

others of its kind, after the time of its composition. Moreover, of the 
seventeen Cupid-sonnets in Caelica mentioned above, fifteen are found 
in the first half, and fourteen before the 40th Sonnet. 

In the second place, as to the kind of relationship they reveal, two 
opinions are possible, either that Greville, writing after Sidney's death, 
returned for the sake of literary exercise to the forms, the subjects and 
the devices used at a certain time by his friend, or that he wrote the 
poems in question and others of the same style in the time and under 
the influence of their actual companionship. The former opinion is 
tenable as regards one or two poems; but it is not the natural con- 
clusion for them all. First, it is inherently the less probable ; secondly, 
it is not in accordance with Greville's genius. Most of them are 
artificial and decorative inventions, in which the thing said is of less 
importance than the way of saying it; and Greville's pen was, as he 
himself knew, ill-adapted to such exercises. He never, except in the 
poems of wliich we are speaking, showed the least interest in poetry 
as a decorative art. Besides, it is to be remembered that Sidney re- 
corded the actual fact of their writing in rivalry. There can be little 
doubt, therefore, that Caelica was begun between 1577 and 1583 and 
that many of the poems in the first half of the sequence as we have 
it belong to that time. 

For further information as to the history of the sonnets we turn 
to the consideration of their metrical characteristics. 

The prevailing forms, including all but thirteen of the poems, are 
the sonnet in the form used by Surrey, ababcdcdefefgg, and six- 
line stanzas (from one to twelve of such stanzas forming a poem). 
These forms and their variations are used as follows : 

1. Sonnet in form ababcdcdefefgg, 41 times. 

2. Sonnet in form ababababababcc (with identical rhyme), once 
(Sonnet 16). 

3. Sonnet of ten lines, 7 times. 

4. Sonnet of eighteen lines, 3 times. 

5. Sonnet of twenty-two lines, 4 times. 

6. Poem of 2 ten-line sonnets, once (Sonnet 59). 

7. Poem of six-lino stanzas, ab ab cc, 34 times. 

8. Poem of eight-line stanzas, abababcc, 3 times. 

9. Combination of sonnet and six-line stanza, 3 times: 

(a) Sonnet -|- six-line stanza -|- ten-line sonnet (50); 

(b) Ten-line sonnet -f- 2 six-line stanzas (70) ; 

(c) Three six-line stanzas -|- sonnet (109). 
One, the long Sonnet 84, is in Poulter's Measure. 

This list shows that Greville included a larger variety of forms 
under the name " sonnet" than any other of the sequence writers. It 
will perhaps also be regarded as showing that he was incapable of 



12 The Works of Fulke Greville 

moulding his material in definite forms, or at least that he was so 
careless of form that he allowed the natural course of his thought to 
determine the length and metrical character of his poem. But this is 
not so certain as it might appear. It is true that when Greville was 
most interested in what he was saying he seems to have chosen the 
form that offered least resistance, and also that the technical difcculties 
of verse-writing were unusually great for him, but it does not appear 
that he was therefore either careless or licentious in his verse, or that 
he was indifferent to formal distinctions. Some of the criticism which 
has been passed upon him in this respect is unjustified, inasmuch as 
the instaaices on which it is founded are instances of irregularity which 
Greville practised with artistic intent, or else are such irregularities as 
are found in other poets of the time against whom the charge of care- 
lessness cannot be laid.^ At least, in the case of the various arrange- 
ments of lines and stanzas which he has chosen to call sonnets, it is a 
fact that he had authority in other writers for each of the variations 
from usual forms which he employed, though not perhaps for giving 
them all the name sonnet. The poem in Poulter's Measure is an 
imitation of a similar poem by Sir Edward Dyer in the same metre, 
and for each of the other forms in the list above he had a model m 
Sidney's Arcadia, if we except those in which a sonnet-form is com- 
bined with six-line stanzas, and in this case the poems are not to be 
regarded as units, but as two or three poems continuing the same 
theme, as, for example, in Sidney's Wonders of England, which con- 
sists of a series of ten-line poems in a sonnet-form bound together m 

one poem. i ji i • i 

The twelve remaining poems are in metres more markedly lyrical 

than the sonnet-for m, and are evidently meant to belong to the same 

^In the former class belongs the irregular rhyming in the plays, and in the 
latter the rhyming of a form in -s with one without -s. For this not uncommon 
usage, compare Spenser's Shepherds' Calendar and Daniel's Works pass^rn 

^These poems form a most interesting example of the custom of literary 
imitations, replies, or variations, common in several forms among poets of 
the time. Besides Dyer's A Fancy and Greville's poem, there is still a third 
in this series, namely Father Southwell's Dyer's Fancy turned to a s^nner's 
complaint, printed with both of the other poems in Hannah's well-known volume 
The Courtly Poets. The amiable controversy of Dr. Hannah and Dr. Grosart 
concerning the question of priority as between Greville and Dyer need not 
detain us; it matters little as to the merits of the poems, an imitator being 
to the Elizabethans as much of a creator as an original; and it is only neces- 
sary to say that my reasons for putting Dyer's first are simply that Poulter s 
Measure is much more characteristic of him than of Greville, and that Father 
Southwell on entering the tournament directs his challenge at Dyer, not 
Greville. See Grosart's ed. of Greville, Vol. II, Essay, pp. Ixxi-lxxii; Hannah, 
Courtly Poets, 154-173. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 



13 



class as the ' songs' of Astrophel and Stella. It is in these that Gre- 
ville's technical faults are most noticeable, and in one or two of them 
it is hard even to determine the metrical rule by which they are made. 
They are as follows: 

2 stanzas, abababec. 

4 stanzas, rhymed sapphics. 
6 stanzas, aa b cc b. 

12 stanzas, of the form aia^bjbjai, all in limping dactyls. 
5 stanzas : ababccdeed. 
5 stanzas : a a b b c c. 

52 lines, seven-syllable trochaics, rhyming a b a b, plus a 
couplet at the end. 
ababcdcdee, five times. 

54 lines, seven- and eight-syllable trochaics, rhyming in 
couplets. 

: (probably corrupt). The form seems to be aa bb cc dd, the 
first four lines iambic, the last four trochaic. One stanza. 
About 250 lines, seven- and eight-syllable trochaics rhym- 
ing in couplets. In the middle portion a regular alterna- 
tion of seven- and eight-syllable couplets is observed, so as 
to give a stanza-effect, as throughout the Eighth Song of 
Astrophel and Stella. 

; 6 lines a a b b c c, apparently of trochaic intent. 



Sonnet 4: 


Sonnet 6: 


Sonnet 29 


Sonnet 37 


Sonnet 45 


Sonnet 52 


Sonnet 56 


Sonnet 61 


Sonnet 74 


Sonnet 75 


Sonnet 76 



Sonnet 83 



The metrical characteristics of the cycle may now be considered 
as evidence concerning the history of its composition. The necessary 
facts for this purpose can be most clearly presented in the following 
table. 





I' 


1^ 


P 


^1 




r 


J 




10 
6 

70 
47 

7 


15 
1 

42 
35 

1 


13 
2 

1 

17 

17 



6 
9 

1 
5 

5 




7 
9 

14 
5 
2 


5 
11 

1 
12 

4* 

3* 


56 


Pripms in stAn/fls . . . . 


38 


Poems formed of a combination 
of sonnets and stanzas 

Number of ll-syl. lines per cent. 

lb., excluding poems wholly in 
11-gyl or nearly so 


3 


Number of poems wholly in 
ll-syl. lines or nearly so 





' See remarks following. 



The twelve poems in song-metres and the one in Poulter's Measure 
are excluded, and the rest, 97 in number, are divided into groups of 



14 The Works of Fulke Greville 

16 or 17 each, as the most convenient way of representing certain 
changes which take place gradually in the course of the sequence. 
Under the first heading, poems in sonnet-form, are included all the 
variations of the proper sonnet, the ten-line, the eighteen-line, and so on. 
The table shows that in some respects the metrical characteristics 
of the latter part of the sequence are different from those of the first 
part, and that the changes take place gradually throughout the sequence. 
In the first place the poems in sonnet-form steadily decrease in number 
and those in stanzas increase. The only exception to the regularity of 
this development is in the first section. Sonnets 1-18, in which the 
number of sonnets is smaller than in the second section and the number 
of poems in stanzas considerably greater. Of this exception something 
will be said presently. 

In the second place, the number of eleven-syllable lines in the first 
part of the sequence is so great that such Hnes may be said to be the 
rule, but it gradually diminishes in the succeeding sections, until 
eleven-syllable lines become exceptional in the section including Son- 
nets 55-72. Thenceforward there is a slight increase in the number. 
But the increase is not generally distributed through the poems of 
these sections; it is due to five poems alone. Two of these, Nos. 85 
and 87, are in sonnet-form; the other three, Nos. 99, 100, 110, are 
poems in six-line stanzas, which are included in the last division of 
the table, although the number of eleven-syllable lines in them is 
respectively only 10 in 18, 12 in 24, 14 in 30, for the reason that they 
are sufficiently hendecasyllabic to be in marked contrast with the other 
poems of this section, and that their metrical character is therefore 
especially significant. These three poems, it is to be noticed, are 
different from those in immediate connection with them in their poetic 
character and style as well as in metrical character. They are personal 
and lyrical, really hymns or prayers, and in contrast with the abstract 
philosophy of all the rest of the poems in the last part of the sequence. 
How are we to construe these changes? They clearly indicate, to 
begin with, that the sequence was written during a considerable period 
of years, and not even approximately at one point in the author's 
career This conclusion depends not so much on the fact that changes 
in metrical character occur, as on the fact that they are of the nature 
of a progression, indicating that Greville passed through several stages 
of metrical practice in the course of the writing of these poems. 

But it is possible to come closer than tliis to the meaning of the 
facts. The figures in the table show that Greville, although he began 
writing in company with Sidney, chose a somewhat different form of 
the sonnet for common use from that which Sidney preferred; that 
is to say, he practised a mixture of ten- and eleven-syllable lines within 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 15 

the same poem. He also wrote a number of poems wholly in eleven- 
syllable lines. In Astrophel and Stella there are not only no hendeca- 
syllabic sonnets, but there is not a single line, in a sonnet, of eleven 
syllables, and in the Arcadia there are but two sonnets containing such 
lines : one, a sonnet in the form used by Surrey, Greville, and Shake- 
speare, has eleven syllables in the second and fourth lines of each 
quatrain ; ^ the other, in a pure Italian form, is wholly hendecasyl- 
labic.^ Greville's practise therefore seems to be due to his own taste 
rather than to his models, and he uses the eleven-syllable, not as an 
imitation of the Italian, or as an experiment in form, but as a natural 
and habitual way of expression. In this respect he is singular among 
the sonnetteers. 

What is meant then by the fact that frdm Sonnet 50 to Sonnet 80, 
roughly, eleven-syllable lines are exceptional? Naturally we think of 
the later period of sonnet- writing in the early 90's. The great sequences 
of that time, Drayton's, Spenser's, Shakespeare's, established the deca- 
syllabic line as part of the character of the sonnet. The attempts to 
adapt Italian forms, with the consequent use of eleven-syllable lines, 
in various lyrical metres, were less important, or at least were in the 
hands of less important men, than in the period of Arcadia and the 
earliest sonnets of Caelica. The years '85 to '95 are the period of the 
most formal use of the decasyllabic, not only in the drama, but also 
in other forms not markedly lyrical. 

On this point we are not dependent on internal evidence alone. 
Daniel, in his Defence of Ryme (1602) says: ^ 

Besides, to me this change of number in a Poem of one nature fits not so 
well, as to mixe uncertainly feminine Rymes \vith masculine, which, ever since 
1 was warned of that deformitie by my kinde friend and countriman Maister 
Hugh Samford, I have alwayes so avoided it, as there are not above two coup- 
lettes in that Kind in all my Poem of the Civill warres: and I would willingly 
if I could, have altered it in all the rest, holding feminine Rymes to be fittest 
for Ditties, and either to be set certaine, or else by themselves.* 

Now although this was not written until 1602, four books of Daniel's 
Poem of the Civill warres were printed in 1595, and the practice of 
distinguishing sharply between ten- and eleven-syllable lines of which 
he speaks began in his case therefore before or about that time. Now, 
after Sidne)r's death, Greville's most intimate association of a purely 

»Bk. Ill, p. 375 (1633 ed.). 
' Bk. IV, pp. 409-10. 

* Hazlewood, Ancient Critical Essays, II., p. 218. 

* I.e., either throughout a poem, or else according to a regular rule of 
recurrence. 



16 The Works of Fulke Greville 

literary kind was with Daniel, and indeed his long continued famil- 
iarity with him was part of the inheritance of his friendship with 
Sidney. For Daniel was one of the poets to whom Wilton had been 
a poetical Elysium and the Countess of Pembroke a sympathetic bene- 
factor, even in the days when Sidney had been the light of that circle. 
Of course the relation between Greville and Daniel was that of patron 
and poor poet; yet there is no reason of course why Greville should 
not follow the leading of his protege in the art which was his peculiar 
possession. Moreover, Greville's name is associated directly with the 
work in which Daniel makes these remarks. Daniel says that this 
work is only an extension, for purposes of publication, of a letter which 
he had written about a year before to a courtier who is generally identi- 
fied with Greville; and the author of the article in Biographia Britan- 
nica quoted from above had seen letters between the two in which 
Greville's judgment was commended by Daniel. Positive proof cannot 
of course be drawn from these facts for the date of the middle section 
of the Sonnets which we are considering; but they at least show in- 
fluences to which we know that Greville was subject and which will 
account for his departure from the practice with which he began. I 
think it probable therefore that the greater number of the Sonnets 
between Nos. 40 and 84 were written in the post-Sidneyan period, or 
between 1586 and 1600. 

Finally, in the last section, from about Sonnet 80 to the end, the 
same condition, infrequency of eleven-syllable lines, exists, and the 
percentage even decreases slightly if we leave out of the count five 
poems in which the hendecasyllabic idea prevails. Greville has there- 
fore arrived at the exact kind of practice in this respect which Daniel 
describes. He now uses eleven-syllable lines again, but he ' sets them 
certain or by themselves,' and shows, besides, a clear intention to asso- 
ciate them with poems of lyrical effect, thus approximating at least 
the limitation of lines of this kind to " ditties," which Daniel advo- 
cates. But at this point we must turn to Greville's dramas, in which 
we find a change in metrical usage exactly parallel to that which takes 
place in the latter parts of the sonnet sequence. 

The chronological relation of Alaham and Mustapha will be con- 
sidered in a following chapter; but in the meantime the opinion of 
Mr. Gosse that Alaham is the earlier may be accepted. Now in Alaham 
there are only exceptional cases of the eleven-syllable line; in Act I 
there are none, in Act II, 4, and so throughout. But in Mustapha 
there are many such lines, and even in passages prevailingly decasyl- 
labic the eleven-syllable lines are in general about ten per cent, of the 
whole number. But the point especially to be noted is that it contains 
passages wholly or largely in eleven-syllable lines. For example, V, 1 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 17 

(17 lines) is wholly hendecasyllabic ; II, 1 contains 83 lines, and of 
the first 25 all but 5 are of eleven syllables, of the following 39 but 3, 
of the last 19, 12. Here then is enough evidence to show that Greville 
was in general following the rule with regard to feminine rhymes that 
they should be " set certain," while his departures from that rule in the 
use of them here and there are in keeping with the freedom he allowed 
himself throughout his work in the application of formal restrictions. 
Again, it is evident that Greville is here using the eleven-syllable line 
in certain passages because he believes that it conduces to an emotional 
effect; the passages in which it is used are either those in which the 
good characters of his play, Camena and Achmat, express with lyrical 
emotion their feelings about the evil world around them, or those in 
which the incidents of the catastrophe are related. 

In the difference, then, between Alaham and Mmtapha we have 
exactly the development in metrical practice wliich appears in the 
second half of Caelica. Reasons will be given later for believing that 
MtLstapha was written after 1603. The metrical evidence, therefore, 
is such as to indicate that the last part of Caelica was written later than 
the other parts and probably after 1600. 

To this argument from the verse must be added the more intangible 
but equally convincing evidence of style and thought. The consecutive 
and repeated reading of the Sonnets confirms beyond all doubt the 
opinion of Prof. Schelling : " Caelica exhibits very decidedly ... a 
deepening maturity of mind, and may have been written through a 
series of years," * and the changes in this respect are such, as I hope 
to show in the following paragraphs, that, like the changes in the 
verse, they could only have taken place through a long period. In the 
last section particularly, from 85 to the end, not only the depth of 
thought, but the subjects treated and the opinions expressed concern- 
ing them indicate the exact latitude and longitude — to take a figure 
favored by Greville himself — in which he was sailing when he wrote 
certain of the Treatises. Finally, there are two minor pieces of exact 
evidence: the 52d Sonnet appeared in John Dowland's First Book of 
Songs or Airs, 1597 ; ^ and the 82d Sonnet is in praise of Elizabeth. If 
the sonnets are in about the order in which they were written, as seems 
to be the case, these poems indicate that the middle group was written 
in Elizabeth's reign. 

It is probable, then, that about the first 40 sonnets were written 
before 1586 ; that the following up to about 84 were written after 1586, 
but before 1600; and that all or most of the remaining sonnets, 85 to 
110, were written after 1600. 

^ Elizabethan Lyrics, as before, p. 220. 

' A. H. Bullen's ed. England's Helicon, p. xxvi. 



18 The Works of Fulke Greville 

II 
The history of Greville's literary activity, which ends in the time 
of Buckingham and Laud, begins in a period which seems to be re- 
moved from that time by even more than the actual fifty years between 
them — in the time of his familiar exercise with Philip Sidney. The 
two friends, who were bound to each other by closer ties than those 
which attached Edward Dyer to the group, were associated in all the 
active pursuits of the chivalry of the age, travel, diplomacy, social 
observances, jousting, pageantry, and plans of ' Indian' adventure. 
But their practice of knight-errantry derives an especial charm, which 
distinguishes them and their circle among the courtiers of Elizabeth, 
from the fact that it included all the intellectual accomplishments of 
the time. All that was best in the learning of England gravitated 
toward Sidney and came within Greville's orbit. Castelnau de Mau- 
vissiere, the French philosopher-statesman, found congenial company 
in their circle.^ They were the most intelligent and courteous auditors 
of Bruno's speculative improvisations.^ And Sidney showed his ap- 
proval of the anti- Aristotelian doctrines which emanated from both of 
these sources by appointing William Temple,^ the translator and expo- 
nent of the philosophy of Eamus, his private secretary. Spenser was 
also of the circle,* and with him they must have discussed and approved 
the Platonic doctrines so much affected in all the more enlightened 

^ Michaud, diet, de la Biog. Univ., s. n. 

''Bruno's Cena de le ceneri, (Le opere italiane, &c., Gottingen, 1888) pp. 
180, -1, and passim; also his Epistola EspUcatoria to the Spaccio de la Bestia 
trionfante, addressed to Sidney. A tradition has grown up of an ' Academy' 
consisting of all the men mentioned in the above paragraph, in imitation of 
Italian institutions. The ultimate source of it is the Cena de le ceneri of 
Bruno, and the immediate the following note by Joseph Warton on an allusion 
to Sidney in Pope's Essay on Man : " Among many things related of the life 
and character of this all-accomplished person, it does not seem to liave been 
much known that he was the intimate friend and patron of the famous atheist 
Giordano Bruno, who was in a secret club with him and Sir Fulke Greville, held 
in London in 1587 [sic]." Quoted by Zouch, Life of Sidney, N. Y., 1808, p. 337. 
This " club" is spoken of by Berti in his well-known work on Bruno, by Beyers- 
dorflf in his learned monograph on Bruno and Shakespeare, and even by Mr. Pox 
Bourne in his revised Life of Sidney ( Heroes of the Nations series ) , and has 
developed by elaborations into a complete ' Academy.' But I can find no evi- 
dence for it except the account by Bruno of the meeting at Greville's house, and 
that is not such as to indicate the existence of a society. (Since this note was 
written an article on Giordano Bruno m England has appeared in the "Quarterly 
Review (no. 392, Oct. 1902), the author of which exposes the tradition and 
carries it back to the same source in Joseph Warton's note.) 

° Diet, of Nat. Biog. 

* See passage quoted, p. ^, from Two Other verie commendable Letters. 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 19 

circles of Europe. Greville was, in fact, a member of the only society 
in England which can be compared in intellectual culture with the 
humanistic coteries and academies of France and Italy; and, in view 
of the reactionary attitude which he maintained in his mature years 
toward the adventurous spirit of the Eenaissance, there is a particular 
interest in the fact that he was the associate in his early manhood of 
some of its most brilliant leaders. 

He had also the opportunity to know all of the new Elizabethan 
literature, except that which was distinctly popular, at its sources. 
Both he and Sidney were in close communication with their univer- 
sities and with the classical verse-writing and play-writing which were 
going on there. ^ At Wilton, where tlie young Countess of Pembroke 
had her court, they found and gave stimulus to literary pursuit, for 
the most part apparently after classical models; and here Greville 
may have met, even in these early days, the poet Samuel Daniel, who 
most influenced his later writing. He may have heard parts of The 
Faerie Queene read in London or at court in 1589. But in his asso- 
ciation with Sidney himself Greville came most directly under the 
influences which formed the new literature, its classicism, its Ital- 
ianism, and the spirit of experimental imitation in which it began. 
All these contacts are interesting. They explain, for one thing, the 
fact of his writing in verse at all, at which some persons have won- 
dered; and the literary forms he adopted, the sonnet and the Senecan 
drama, are due to his associations. But he used these literary forms, 
not to rival the masters of them in their own kinds, but as means 
adaptable to certain peculiar ends of his own ; and the points in which 
he diverges from his literary models are even more interesting than 
those in wliich he shows his indebtedness to them. 

The sonnets which we have distinguished as the first group are 
those written under the immediate influence of Sidney, and in their 
thought, as well as in their literary character, they show this influence. 
Sidney, and the circle of intellectual associates that gathered about him, 
found a great charm in the Platonic mode of thought. In Astrophel 
and Stella and the Arcadia the prevailing idea is the contrast between 
the abstract spiritual ideals which appeal to the soul alone and the 
concrete forms on which ordinary human desire is fixed. Sidney, 
however, held this perhaps rather as a literary or decorative convention 
than as a serious pliilosophy of life, and in Astrophel and Stella he 
rebels petulantly against the artificial restraint it lays upon nature.^ 

^ Grosart's Memorial-Introduction, Vol. I, pp. xxx-xxxii. 
'For distinct Platonism, see A. and 8., 5, 21, 25, 71, 72 and two sonnets 
first printed in the 1598 ed. of his works (Pollard's ed. A. and 8., pp. 173, 174.) 



20 The Works of Fulke GreviUe 

Greville expounds this Platonic thought in a number of earlier sonnets, 
and he is more faithful than Sidney to its absolute distinctions. Some- 
times he pays homage to a certain lady in whom the spiritual ideals 
are supposed to be realized, as in Sonnet 3. 

More than most faire, full of that heavenly fire 
Kindled above to show the Maker's glory, 

Thou window of the skie, and pride of spirits, 

True character of Honour in perfection, 

Thou heavenly creature, judge of earthly merits, 

And plorious prison of man's pure affection 
If in my heart all nymphs else be defaced 
Honour the shrine, where you alone are placed.^ 

But this and two or three other sonnets in the same strain are almost 
certainly addressed to Queen Elizabeth, and not to the poets mistress, 
and when he writes of ordinary love Greville's natural pessimism ex- 
presses itself in the form of an absolute contrast between the ideal and 
the actual. He will not admit that virtue and beauty can keep their 
likeness in earthly forms. Thus, in Sonnet 10, he addresses Love: 

Rather goe backe unto that heavenly quire 
Of Nature's riches, in her beauties placed, 
And there in contemplation feed desire. 
Which till it wonder, is not rightly graced; 
For those sweet glories, which you doe aspire. 
Must, as idea's, only be embraced, 

Since excellence in other forme enioyed, 

Is by descending to her saints destroyed. 

Whether couched in the language of Platonism or not, this is Gre- 
ville's ordinary attitude. The sonnets in which he speaks the language 
of natural passion are very few, and the far commoner mood is that 
in which he renounces earthly love and Caelica together. It is indeed 
a fair question whether Caelica is a cycle of love or of anti-love. 

The literary qualities of the sonnets of this early period are such 
as would be expected in poems written in an experimental period and 
in close imitation of the work of another. They m ay be described as fol- 

^The first two lines are almost identical with the first two of Spenser's 8th 

Sonnet: , ,. . ^ 

More than most faire, full of the living fire 
Kindled above unto the Maker neere. 

Compare the description of the birth of Love in Spenser's An Eymne in Honour 

of Loue, 11, 64-5 : 

And taking to him wings of his owne heate 
Kindled at first from heavens life-giving fyre. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 21 

lows : first, frequent classical allusion, especially in the form of fancies 
concerning Cupid and his attributes; secondly, poverty of subjects, 
shown in numerous variations of the same devices ; tliirdly, artificiality, 
the larger number of the poems being in the class of exercises on the set 
themes of sonnetteers; fourthly, the occurrence of a number of poems 
written apparently in direct competition with Sidney, and hence partly 
fulfilling the conditions of the " tournament-sonnet." 

With these early sonnets are certainly to be placed all of the poems 
in seven- and eight-syllable lines which occur later in the sequence and 
most of the other poems in ' song'-measures. All of these are experi- 
mental and in imitation of Sidney. On the other hand it seems likely 
that among the first ten sonnets are some which were either added to 
the sequence at a later time or were substituted for earlier poems which 
originally held their places. It is not probable, for example, that Son- 
nets 3 and 7 were written by so inexperienced a hand as most of those 
from 11 to 40. 

In the poems of this first section Greville for the only time at- 
tempted the lighter steps of fancy ; and the result confirms in substance 
his own criticism, that his was a " creeping genius." The effect of 
their fanciful decoration, especially when used, as it often is, to give 
point to harsh and cynical thought, is not only unpleasing, but dis- 
pleasing, as the failures of a serious temperament in this kind of effort 
usually are. It is true that there are some sonnets here which are 
exceptions to the rule. Sonnet 3, " More than most faire, full of that 
heavenly fire;" Sonnet 7, "The world, that all containes is euer 
mouing;" Sonnet 17, "Cynthia, whose glories are at fulle for euer;" 
and finally Sonnet 22, " I, with whose colors Myra drest her head," 
which is Greville's simplest and most feeling love-poem and con- 
tains his finest line: all of these are poems worthy of a place in 
the Elizabethan anthology. Two of them, however, are probably not 
chronologically placed, namely, 3 and 17, which seem to be addressed 
to Elizabeth, and very likely a third. ^ In the one or two others in 
which there is something of his better quality he has met success by 
escaping from the literary fashion which he was vainly attempting to 
follow, and for the artificial devices which make up the bulk of this 
part the criticism that they are " harsh fantastic echoes" of Sidney * 
is not too severe. 

Gradually, however, a change appears. In the metrical exercises 
of the first group Greville worked out to some extent his technical 



* See the preceding paragraph. 

'Mrs. Mary A. Ward, Introd. to selections from Greville in Mr. T. H. 
Ward's The English Poets, Vol. I, 



22 The Works of Fulke GreviUe 

freedom, and the poems beginning with Sonnet 40 first show clearly 
his characteristic quality. His obscurity has become greater rather 
than less; for it is now increased by the darkness of close and myste- 
rious thought. Both the allegorical devices and the displeasing satire 
of the first group are noticeably absent, and instead of Platonism 
there is the ordinary contrast between truth and right on the one side 
and the world on the other. The religious emotion, on the other hand, 
which inspires the eloquence of the later sonnets, is not expressed 
anywhere in this group. We read of Reason and Nature's wisdom, but 
there is no distinct religious expression, though the themes give oppor- 
tunity for the expression of such ideas. The thought rests on the 
bitterness of experience and the absurdities and contradictions of life. 

The literary characteristics of this group, which for the sake of 
convenience we limit definitely by the 40th and 84th Sonnets, are as 
distinct as the characteristics of its thought. First, classical allusion 
is infrequent, and when it appears it is not used for the sake of orna- 
ment. In 62, for example, Cupid, Mars, and Mercury are mentioned, 
but without their attributes and as mere names for love, war, and 
learning. In the first ten sonnets of this section there are four con- 
taining classical allusion ; in the other thirty-five but three. 

Secondly, the images used for illustration are of a noteworthy kind. 
The greater number are drawn from real life and almost all of them 
from its homely conditions. Thus in 43 it is the man who suffers from 
gossiping neighbors, and again the child that suffers from the nurse's 
tyranny. If these are somewhat grotesque — as befits their partly ironi- 
cal intent — ^the same realistic method is turned to better advantage in 
61, in which the child and its nurse (a favorite image of Greville's), 
the rower, the looking-glass, and the boy leaving his home to go into 
the world, are used for illustration. Another class of images are those 
drawn from the natural sciences and other branches of learning, almost 
exclusively, however, from those which are practical and closely related 
to common life. It is notable that Greville never — or rarely — resorts 
to speculative inquiry, pseudo-science, or superstitious lore, as Donne 
and Sir Thomas Browne, for example, are wont to do, but is rather 
distinguished by the accuracy and plainness of his illustrations. Sonnet 
63 affords a number of examples of these images from familiar learn- 
ing: 1, the fact that those who sail around the world return in the 
same direction in which they set out, an illustration used by Donne 
with an added subtlety in his A Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness; 
2, the similarity in the complexion of those who live in the Tropics and 
in the Arctic Circle; 3, the rising of the moisture and fire of earth 
to the elements in which they are born, and the changes of form they 
endure in arriving at the goal of their desires, an exception perhaps 



The Works of Fulke Greville 23 

to the general character of these illustrations described above; 4, the 
compass and the load-stone. In 61, again, we have in lines 50-54 the 
rising of the sap in trees ; in 77 the dying man and his doctor ; in 78, 
the parallels of latitude and longitude, henceforth a commonplace in 
Greville's works ; in 79, the atoms which can " neither rest nor stand 
nor can erect," straws that move toward "ieat," glow-worms shining 
by night. Some of these illustrations show more than usual curiosity 
in the natural sciences, and one cannot but recall the fact, in reading 
them, that Greville was a fellow-resident of Essex House from 1594 
to the day of Essex' arrest with Francis Bacon, whose Advancement of 
Learning he partly echoed and partly controverted in his own Treatise 
of Humane Learning. The common characteristic of all the images 
of this group, from whatever source they are drawn, is their plainness 
and their remarkable definiteness, and the effect they are meant to 
produce is that of the closest possible adherence to reality. In avoiding 
all that might seem literary ornament, he makes his images correspond 
to the exact truth of observation and applies them with ingenious 
exactness to the truths they illustrate. We should not need to go 
outside of the Sonnets we are considering for additional examples, but 
the most remarkable case of the quality in question is in one of the 
Treatises, in which he refers to the pacific attitude of the Catholic 
powers toward England at the time when he was writing : 

Lie not France, Italy, Poland, Spain 

Still as the snow doth when it threatens more.^ 

Again in the Chorus Quarius of Alaham, alluding to a phenomenon 
well-known to navigators : 

Like as strong windes doe worke upon the sea. 
Stirring and tossing wanes to warre each other: 
So princes doe with people's humors play, 
As if Confusion were the septer's mother. 

But crownes ! take heed ; when humble things mount high 

The windes oft calme before the billows lie. 

Thirdly, notwithstanding the obscurity of Greville's writing, of 
which all his critics speak with feeling, his vocabulary is distinguished 
by its simplicity and definiteness. He calls things by their commonest 
names and renounces the ornaments of language. The emotional power 
of bare unadorned words in expressing intense convictions and deep 
feeling is one of the secrets of his impressiveness, and, like the plain- 
ness of his images, his use of such diction is a sign of his effort for 
incisiveness and expressiveness, rather than for decorative beauty. It 

' A Treatise of Monarchy, st. 214 (Of Church). 



24 The Works of Fulke Greville 

has the effect of keeping his abstract truths close to the emotions of 
life, of keeping them alive with the life of the experience in which 
they were born. The famous line from the 22d Sonnet, in which the 
poet recalls the past favors of the inconstant Myra, owes something 
of its beauty to the eloquence and intensity of common words : 

Was it for this that I might Myra see 
Washing the water with her beauties white? 

— though there is something besides in the power of the second line 
that defies analysis. Plainness of diction sometimes becomes mere 
baldness, when the thought is not high enough to ennoble it, and there 
are many prosaic lines and couplets in the sonnets; but on the other 
hand it may be both the sign and the source of power, as some of the 
following lines will show : 

When all this all doth passe from age to age.^ 

Glory growes dark, the sonne becomes a night 
And makes this great world feele a greater might.* 

Then Caelica lose not heart-eloquence, 
Love understands not " come again." ' 

Life is a top which whipping Sorrow driueth.* 

Or again, of the strangeness of love in a world in which there is noth- 
ing but varied unhappiness : 

Love shall become the very love of sorrow.^ 

Or the following stanza, which in depth and subtlety surpasses all but 
the greatest Elizabethan sonnets: 

But when this life is from the body fled 
To see it selfe in that eternall glasse 
Where Time doth end, and thoughts accuse the dead. 
Where all to come is one with all that was; 
Then liuing men aske how he left his breath, 
That while he liue'd neuer thought of death.* 

This quality is not peculiar to the part of Greville's work which we 
are now considering; we find an excellent illustration of it, for exam- 
ple, in a line from the Treatise of Warres,'' on the vicissitudes of fortune 
under God's justice: 

He makes corn grow where Troy itself once stood. 

'Sonnet 69. =" lb. * Sonnet 61. 

* Sonnet 87. » Sonnet 9. « Sonnet 88. 

' Stanza 34. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 25 

But it is more noticeable in this middle group than in the first, and 
in the later sonnets and the Treatises it is somewhat obscured by 
the vocabulary of learning, though even in these the use of uncom- 
mon words is limited to what the technical character of the subject 
demands. 

Fourthly, the phrasing, to borrow a word from the technique of 
music, is noticeably short. Thought is completed as far as possible 
in periods of one or two lines. The style is broken and sententious; 
and there is no effort at continuousness or flow either of syntax or of 
metre. 

These characteristics of the poems in which Greville first showed 
his true genius are interesting to students of Elizabethan literature. 
They show, first, that he wrote in a different manner when he was 
under Sidney's influence and when he followed his own bent; and in 
the second place they are traits different from those of the poets most 
admired by the cultivated readers of the nineties. Absence of deco- 
rative device, especially of classical allusion, plainness of diction, and 
the use of homely unornamental images, in the decade of the Faerie 
Queene and the love-sequences, are marks of a departure from prevailing 
literary styles. Greville himself was aware that he was a different 
kind of poet from Sidney and many of his later contemporaries, and 
he explained wherein, as it seemed to him, the difference lay. In his 
Life of Sidney, after praising the dexterity of his friend, " even with 
the dashes of his pen to make the Arcadian antiques beautifie the 
margents of his works," he continues : 

For my own part, I found my creeping Genius more fixed upon the Images 
of Life, than the Images of Wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on 
whose foot the black Oxe had not already trod, as the Proverbe is, but to those 
only, that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World, such as having lost the 
sight of their Gardens, and groves, study to saile on a right course among Rocks 
and quick-sands.' 

As regards the literary theory involved in this profession it seems 
indeed to have little to distinguish it from much familiar criticism of 
the time. When Mrs. Ward says of it that it " breathes the spirit of a 
new world; and in parting Lord Brooke from the writer of Astrophel 
and Stella places him mentally beside Milton and Bacon," ^ she is 
thinking of the gravity of its tone and its deep humanitarian feeling, 
of the distinction in thought and spirit which we have said separates 
Greville from what is characteristic in the Elizabethan time; and 
certainly the accent of the passage makes it a different thing from the 

^Life of Sidney, Grosart ed., IV, pp. 222-3; ed. 1652, 245-6. 
' Mr. T. H. Ward's The English Poets, I, p. 367. 



26 The Works of Fulke Greville 

parallels to it which might be cited from Elizabethan critics. But the 
£esthetic theory which it suggests is only the imperfect rule of moral 
or utilitarian dependency which is found in most critics of Greville's 
time and is still effectively alive. It is superficially like the criticism 
which rested the claims of Homer and Hesiod upon the fact that they 
were teachers of divinity and the useful arts. As such it has left its 
traces in the unpoetic character of much that Greville wrote in verse. 
But taken in its context and in connection with Greville's actual prac- 
tice it has also a more definite meaning. He has been speaking of the 
pastoral and classical images with which Sidney's works are adorned, 
and of their literary decoration in general, and to indicate the con- 
trast between his own work and Sidne3r's he says that his genius is not 
adapted to the fanciful ornaments of poetry, or, as he calls them, the 
"images of wit," but rather is fixed upon the "images of life," the 
commonplace reality of experience. We have seen how true to this 
modest profession Greville shows himself in the Sonnets of the group 
which we are considering. Even to renounce classical allusion, pastoral 
device, and decorative imagery is a sign of originality in a courtly poet 
of the nineties. But the distinction goes deeper than the mere garb of 
poetry and involves a difference in artistic aims and methods. 

In his Defence of Poesy Sidney described with remarkable breadth 
the universal laws of the fine arts, but he also showed the influence of 
the peculiar spirit of his time. The following passages illustrate both 
of these characteristics: 

There is no Arte deliuered to mankinde, that hath not the workes of 
Nature for his principall obiect, without which they could not consist, and on 
which they so depend, as they become Actors and Players as it were, of what 
Nature will haue set foorth . . .; only the Poet, disdayning to be tied to 
any such subiection, lifted vp with the vigor of his owne inuention, dooth growe 
in effect, another Nature, in makeing things either better than Nature bringeth 
forth, or quite a newe formes such as neuer were in nature: ... he goeth 
hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her guifts, 
but freely ranging only within the Zodiack of his owne wit. Nature neuer set 
forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as diuers Poets haue done, neither with 
plesant riuers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers: nor whatsoeuer els may 
make the too much loued earth more louely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only 
deliuer a golden.' 

That nature's " world is brasen, the Poets only deliuer a golden" ' 
is in a certain sense true whatever the kind of poetry, whoever the 
poets; but it is particularly true of the poets of quick fancy and free 
invention who create a new world clearly and intentionally finer than 

* An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Arber, p. 24 ; The Defence of Poesy, pp. 67-9, 
Misc. Works of Sidney, Boston, 1860. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 27 

nature ever set forth, whose method of illustrating life is the idealist's, 
and not the realist's. It describes what was more or less consciously 
regarded as the function of literature by all the more cultivated writers 
of the time. It is the idealized expression of the spirit which animated 
the sonnetteers in creating their " golden worlds" of love, and guided 
the pens of the romancers, the pastoralists, and the author of the Faerie 
Queene. Even the affectation of make-believe languages, as in Euphu- 
ism and Arcadianism, and the conventional nature pieced up from 
the bestiary and other fabulous science are signs of a tendency in the 
art of the time to avoid the contacts of vulgar reality. It is not true 
of course that this literature is divorced from life ; " there is no Arte 
deliuered to mankinde, that hath not the workes of Nature for his 
principall obiect." But its method of illustrating life was to create 
another world corresponding to the actual world and illuminating it 
at many points, yet not the same and not even like it. Greville's method, 
on the contrary, is to illustrate life by life. His object is not to gild 
reality, but to reproduce the very color and touch of its brass. He 
desires above all that his readers shall know his abstractions actually 
true to experience, and by plainness of diction, omission of ornament, 
and illustrations from real observation, he guards against the suspicion 
that his is a mere imaginary world of poetry. With noteworthy inde- 
pendence, which attaches our interest and fully justifies it, he seeks 
what there may be to engage the mind and please the imagination, in 
short the charm of poetry, in the objects closest at hand. 

Greville himself, it is true, was not conscious that his departure 
from the poets of his circle had a literary significance. In his own 
mind it was their moral, and not their literary, character that distin- 
guished his poems from those of his associates. He felt that his tem- 
perament was too serious, his mind too " weather-beaten in the Sea of 
this World" for the joyous freedom in which their infancy dilated, that 
he had to pick his steps more carefully along the hard path of expe- 
rience because he could not see the aim of the journey so clearly. This 
was his explanation of the character of his poetry, and he was unques- 
tionably right in attributing it to the peculiarity of his own tempera- 
ment. It was a trait of his mind, as we see in his letters,^ to dwell 
habitually on the falseness of motives and ideals which passed cur- 
rent in the world for good and even for best, and his tendency toward 
gloomy reflection may well have been encouraged by his physical frailty, 

^ The reference is to the many private letters of Greville's printed in the 
Reports of the Historical MSS. Commission (the Coke MSS.) and not used by 
any of the biographers of Greville. They are principally letters of John Coke, 
Greville's secretary, afterward Sir John Coke, Secretary of State; some of the 
more interesting will be quoted from in the following pages. 



28 The Works of Fulke Greville 

which through long periods was actual ill-health. Sir Eobert Naun- 
ton, indeed, who knew him well, said that his physical weakness was 
due to the over-activity of his mind; he wrote to a friend that Gre- 
ville's health was distempered "by the restless working of his own 
thoughts." ^ 

But the fact that his literary departure was unconscious does not 
alter its significance. In view of such achievements as Sonnets 61, 69, 
87, 88, for example, it is evident that he had more of the poet's peculiar 
gift than he cared to claim for himself ; and that in setting himself a 
more serious aim, as he supposed, than the poet's he took the very 
means of attaining an original literary effect. By trying to make his 
words tally exactly with actual experience he succeeded in giving to 
single lines and sometimes to longer passages, in absolutely simple 
words, a peculiar power which is unlike anything in the poets with 
whom he was personally associated. It is different in kind rather than 
degree from the fanciful eloquence of Sidney, the flowing and orna- 
mented style of Spenser, and the intellectual grace of Daniel. The 
best parallel to the effect of these lines is to be found in the works of 
John Donne, a poet who, with a much clearer consciousness of what he 
was doing, departed, as Greville did, from the prevailing Elizabethan 
modes. There is much to justify a comparison between these two poets. 
Like Greville, Donne renounced classical allusion for the sake of orna- 
ment, and showed a liking for realistic and scientific images ; and this 
in the decade of the Faerie Queene. They were both actuated by the 
desire to say more incisive and significant things than the conventional 
sonnetteers and the diffuse Spenserians; and they are distinguished 
among their contemporaries by extraordinary richness and subtlety of 
thought. And finally at their best they both illustrate the boundless 
power of poetic suggestion in a bare as distinguished from an orna- 
mented diction. 

In discussing the general characteristics of Greville's work we have 
passed somewhat beyond the scope of the chronological plan we have 
been following. There is a third group of the sonnets, distinguishable 
by traits of metre, style and subject-matter. This consists of the 
sonnets beginning with 85 and including all the following to the end 
of the sequence, which were written, as seems probable, after 1600, 
and some of them considerably after that date. The most striking 
peculiarity of this part of Caelica is that it has no mention of the lady 
to whom the earlier poems are addressed, or even of the subject of 
love in any form. Eighty-five is a formal farewell to Cupid, 
Farewell, sweet boy, complaine not of my truth; 

' Twelfth Report Hist. MSS. Com., App., Part I, p. 68. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 29 

in 86 the poet takes the vows of the higher, spiritual love, in language 
much like that of his early Platonism, 

Love is the peace, whereto all thoughts do striue; 

and thenceforth he writes on political, moral, and religious themes 
alone. The thought in these poems is closely parallel to that of the 
Treatises and the choruses of the plays, and the common metrical form 
is the six-line stanza; it is probable, therefore, that some of them are 
chips thrown oflE in the shaping of the longer works. But there are also 
some poems in this group, particularly Sonnets 98, 99, 100, 110, of a 
freer and more lyrical character, which add something to our estimate 
of Greville's poetic range. They are distinguished in their subjects and 
the mental attitude they reveal from the earlier sonnets, for while he 
appeared in those as the poet of experience these give him a title to a 
place among the religious poets of the Jacobean period. Their tone is 
sombre and admonitory as in all of Greville's writings, but open in- 
vective and prophecy take the place of the covert irony of 69 and 77, • 
for example; and it is not now the power of evil in the world that 
excites the poet's indignation, but the hypocrisy and corruption of 
those who assume to be the chosen seed of Israel, 

That sensuall, vnsatiable vaste wombe 
Of the seen church. 

In their denunciation of the sins of the priesthood they illustrate 
the meaning of the misunderstood Chorus Quintus of Mustapha, in 
which by the dramatic method he was following Greville was prevented 
from gi\ing expression to the deep religious feeling, truly Puritan in 
its inwardness and its intimate personal character, which was the 
source of his antagonism to the church. The ^ church,' it should be 
noted, means here not only the church of Rome. Passages of unques- 
tionable definiteness in the Treatises show that Puritanism, Romanism, 
and Anglicanism fell, as such, under the same condemnation in Gre- 
ville's mind. Religion, he believed, was purely an aspiration of the 
individual souls of the elect, and could not be expressed in an institu- 
tion. This conviction is surely not that of Greville's youth. It belongs 
to the latest period of his thought, and it marks the difference which 
separates Greville, when his whole work is considered, from Sidney 
and Sidney's age, and gives him affinities with the more distressed and 
spiritually self-conscious age when Puritanism was dominant. 

The literary characteristics of these poems are not less interesting. 
In the first place, they are the least obscure of Greville's poems, and 
in fact offer no unusual difficulties. Again, the diction is elevated 



30 The Works of Fulke Greville 

where in the former poems it was plain; the figures are lofty and 
rhetorical, rather than homely and ironical ; and whereas the phrasing 
before was noticeably short, there is now an attempt, sometimes suc- 
cessful, at long and sonorous periods. Thought, syntax, and metre 
flow forward with a steady and even stately movement. In 99, 100, 
and 110 these characteristics are particularly emphasized, these poems 
being, under the name of sonnets, actually hymns in the form of 
prayers, each with a refrain at the end of the stanza. One would 
like to find traces of literary influence in this later group of religious 
lyrics; and in form and phrase there are possibly signs of the wonder- 
fully diffused influence of the " divine" songs of Donne. In some 
respects they are quite different from anything of Donne's, and there 
is no distinct evidence of either literary or personal relations between 
the two poets; but in the last stanza of Sonnet 99, for example, and 
particularly in the fourth line, there is something that suggests the 
master who most influenced Jacobean and Caroline poetry : 

If from this depth of sinne, this hellish graue, 
And fatall absence from my Sauiour's glory, 
I could implore His mercy Who can saue, 
And for my sinnes, not paines of sinne, be sorry: 
Lord from this horror of iniquity, 
And hellish graue, Thou wouldst deliuer me. 



II 

THE DRAMAS 



Though the Senecan drama of the Elizabethan period has not 
been ckariy enough distinguished in the general historieso the d'ama 
by Comer, Fleay, and Ward, its characteristics have been d scribedTn 
^veral recent monographs, and it will not be necessary to rleXr" 
what .s already wel known through these works.' The culfof tU 

safsfactonly discussed in any work which has yet appeared and^ 

T:1Z! """" '' "'' "' ■°'^"''"=*-- '" «-il.e-s play * 
GreviUe had every reason to be interested in the Senecan drama 
At Cambridge, both during his residence there and in the foUoTnt 
years, during which he was in frequent communication .LZsZt 
versity many plays of this form in Latin were produced, and t was 
especially popular at Tritiny College, which he continuali; aided b^h 

and Sid"™?- u'' '""""^^ *' ""'^- O^'"'"' S"^-^'' "--rsity, 
and Sidney himself were also interested in it. We do not know whether 
Grevile was with Sidney when Dr. Gage's Meleager was play«l a 
Chnrt Church CoLege in .584, in the presence of liiecster, Pembroke 
and their young kinsman, but we may guess, with the ielp of the 
Defence of Poesy, what kind of comparisons he heard Sidney draw 

hfvehTd "'; ^^'"'' "' ""= '""^ °f ^°»rt, where he musi 

have had many acquaintances in the years of his plain Mastership, the 
Senecan form was the form of predilection. Greville's friend, Francis 
^con It will be remembered, took a part in the production of the 
^•^fortunes of Arthur before the Queen in 1587-8. Eobert Wilmot, 
of the Inner Temple, was another promoter of t he Seneean idea, and 

h.„.7^T '"" "7' important are: Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca o„ Eliza- 

engU,chcnTrasod,e. Stra,aburg, 1893. Compare aI»o a note by Prof. SainUbnrv 
m Grosart'a ed.ton of Daniel, III, pp. vii to xi, though Prof. Saint7bur7was 
not aware of .11 the exemplar, of the later Senecan flourishing, of which he was 
partienlarly writing, and Prof. Herford', LUerary Relation of EnX^ Z 
Oermany m the Sixteenth Century, ,m:sim. 

I have also had the beneflt of a Harvard dissertation by Dr. J A Lester on 

the El^abetkan peru,d. which has not yet been printed, and I gladly acknowl- 
^ge my indebtedness both to Dr. Lester and to Dr. W. A. Neilfon, o'f HaZd 

^^s Teviire '"' °" "' "■•"""' "' "■" ■""' ■" "■» '"- <""«" - 



31 



32 The Works of Fulke Greville 

we mention him particularly because in the address to the " Gentlemen 
Students of the Inner Temple" which he prefixed to his Tancred and 
Gismunda (1591), he gives a better illustration of the motives which 
led to the cultivation of the classical drama than can be found else- 
where. The models, he says, from which he drew his license as a play- 
wright were Beza's Abraham and Buchanan's Jephtha, and he conjures 
his Gismund not to " straggle in her plumes abroad, but to contain 
herself within the walls of your house; so am I sure she shall be safe 
from the tragedian tyrants of our time," that is to say, from the popular 
dramatists and actors.^ 

But the popularity of the Senecan drama at court and in the law- 
yers' houses declined after the full development of the native institu- 
tion, and the responsibility for the later continuance of the genus in 
its strict classical form seems to rest largely upon one person. It was 
no less a person than Mary Sidney who drew a new tributary to feed 
the rivulet, and the source from which it came is most interesting 
in its suggestion of what might have happened to the English stage. 
In 1590 she wrote, and in 1592 printed, a translation of the Marc 
Antoine of Eobert Garnier, one of the founders of the French classical 
drama.^ Probably on account of the " popularity of Antonie in select 
circles," Kyd translated another of Garnier's plays, his Cornelie, in 
1590-2 (published 1594),^ and all of the plays in exact imitation of the 
Senecan form that followed were directly or indirectly due to the 
impulse given by the Countess of Pembroke's work. The full list of 
them is as follows : 

Published 

The Countess of Pembroke Antonie 1592 

Thomas Kyd Coenelia 1594 

Samuel Daniel Cleopatra * 1594 

Philotas ^ 1605 

Samuel Brandon Virtuous Octavia ^ 1598 

Sir William Alexander Darius 1603 

Croesus 1604 

The Alexandrian 1605 

Julius C^sar « 1607 

^ Hazlitt's Dodsley, VII, p. 15. 

° The Countess of Pembroke's Antonie, ed. with introduction by Alice Luce, 
Weimar, 1897. 

'See Sarrazin, Kyd und sein Kreis, Berlin, 1892, p. 49; Kyd's Cornelia is 
printed in Hazlitt's Dodsley, V, and also edited by H. Gassner in Jahreshericht 
der Luitpold-realschule, 1894, and in Mr. Boas' ed. of Kyd, 1902. 

* Grosart's ed. of Daniel, Vol. III. 

" See Collier's Hist, of Dram. Poetry, first edition. III, pp. 259-60. 

'Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, 3 vols., Glasgow, 1872. He 
called his plays ' Monarchic Tragedies.' 



The Works of Fulke Greville 33 

Published 

Sir Fulke Greville Mustapha 1609 

Alaham ^ 1633 

Most of the plays of this group are distinguished by certain com- 
mon traits from the early Senecan plays. These traits are: (1) regu- 
larity in verse-form, and in Daniel's Cleopatra, Brandon's Octavia and 
Alexander's Monarchic Tragedies, the regular use of abab rhyming; 
(2) the use of elaborate stanza-forms, wdth a complicated rhyme- 
scheme, in the Choruses, characteristic of all except three of the group, 
of which we will speak in a moment. These traits are the plainest 
external marks of the French form of the Senecan drama, serving to 
distinguish it from the earlier English form. The Countess of Pem- 
broke used blank verse, ^vith rhyme only in stychomythy, and at the 
ends of scenes, and rarely under other conditions. Kyd (except in one 
scene) used blank verse, with occasional rhymed couplets — these rhymed 
couplets being introduced, apparently with an intentional approxima- 
tion to regularity, at intervals of from 13 to 16 lines. But the alternate 
rhyming (abab) used by Daniel in Cleopatra, and perhaps imitated by 
him from Tancred and Gismunda, was followed by the later writers, 
Brandon and Alexander. 

Three of the plays of the group, liowever, do not have these char- 
acteristics, namely, Daniel's Philotas and the two plays of Greville. 
First, their verse-form is peculiar and different from that of any other 
English plays. Lines rhymed alternately, lines rhyming in couplets 
and unrhymed lines are mixed together in such a way that none of the 
three becomes the fixed form of a passage. Often the alternate rhyme 
and the rh}Tne in couplets are arranged so as to suggest, without per- 
fectly conforming to, the familiar six-line stanza, or sometimes a 
succession of such stanzas. Daniel is particularly fond of this arrange- 
ment and in fact has scenes which are almost regular in the six-line 
stanza; while Greville often is fairly regular in the alternation of a 
couplet and a single unrhymed line, thus : aabccdeef, etc. The 
following analysis of passages in Greville will make the description 
clearer, the crosses representing unrhymed lines. 

Alaham, III, 1 : 

4- -f aa + + bbcdcdee + -}- ffgg + hh + + + (first 26 lines) 
Mustapha, 1,2: 

abab + -f ccd + d + ee + fF + gg -j- hh + ii + jj + kk + 11 (first 34 
lines ) 
Mustapha, V, 3, speech of Achmat (p. 407, Gros. ed. ) : 

-I- aa + bbcdcddeefgfghhi + i -f -f + (first 25 lines) 

' The date of publication is not an indication here of the time of writing. 



34 The Works of Fulke Greville 

Greville occasionally introduces an elaborate metrical device in Mus- 
taplia, as in II, 3, where twelve lines are rhymed on two sounds. 
Stychomythy is always in rhyme. It should be added that Daniel is 
more regular than Greville and practices the mixture of blank-verse 
passages with rhymed passages more than the mixture of the two forms 
in the same passage; but the ruling idea seems to be the same in both 
poets, namely to relieve the monotony of rhyme both by avoiding regu- 
larity of arrangement and by interspersing unrhymed lines. The 
following passage from Daniel's Defence of Ryme seems to show that 
in his case at least this was the motive : 

I must confesse, that to mine owne eare, those continuall cadences of 
couplets used in long and continued Poems, are very tyresome, & unpleasing, 
by reason that stil, me thinks they run on, with a sound of one nature, & a 
kinde of certaintie which stuffs the delight rather then entertaines it . . . 

. . . And I must confesse my Adversary hath wrought this much upon me, 
that I thinke a Tragedie would indeed best comporte with a blancke verse, 
and dispence with Ryme, saving in the Chorus or where a sentence shall require 
a couplet.^ And to avoid this over-glutting the eare with that alwayes certaine, 
and full incounter of Ryme I have assaide in some of my Epistles to alter the 
usual place of meeting, and to set it further off by one verse, to trie how I 
could disuse my own eare, and to ease it of this continuall burthen, which 
indeede seemes to surcharge it a little too much, but as yet I cannot come 
to please myselfe therein; this alternate or crosse Ryme, holding still the 
best place in my affection.' 

The second departure of these three plays from the rest of the later 
Senecan group is in the use of simple stanza-forms, especially the 
six-line stanza, for the Choruses. 

The interest of these departures lies not only in the fact that they 
point to association between Greville and Daniel during their produc- 
tion, but also to the fact that they are traits of the English Senecan 
form of the Inns, and therefore indicate a return, in these respects at 
least, from the French model to the older English form. The use 
of moral abstractions, such as Time, Eternity, Malice, Craft, Pride, 
Corrupt Keason, and of spiritual beings such as Good and Bad Spirits, 

^ This principle of marking a ' sentence,' or maxim, by rhyme is more or 
less observed in all the Senecan plays. It may be worth noting that the quota- 
tion-marks throughout Greville's works mean no more than that the words form 
such a ' sentence' or maxim. 

'Hazlewood, Anc. Crit. Essays, as before, II, pp. 217-8. As the Tancred and 
Gismunda probably gave alternate-rhyming to the later Senecans, so it may 
have suggested the mixture of rhyme and blank verse to Greville and Daniel. 
Robt. Wilmot in rewriting it in 1591 left part in alternate rhyme and converted 
part to blank verse. Kyd, in one scene of Cornelia, II, 1, has the same unregu- 
larity that Greville and Daniel practise. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 35 

as the persons of the Choruses, is another feature of these three plays 
in which they agree with the older English form, and not with the 
other plays of this late ' school,' in which the persons of the Choruses 
are human beings, Koman soldiers, for example. Both of Greville's 
plays, therefore, and the Philotas of Daniel, although they were un- 
doubtedly inspired by the later activity after the French, depart from 
the typical form peculiar to fhat activity and follow the form developed 
earlier in England itself.^ 

Before passing to the consideration of Greville's plays in particular, 
a slight digression may be indulged, to point out a possible sequel to 
the hislory of this later Senecan drama to which attention has not 
been called. Sir William Davenant was an inmate, part of the time a 
page, in Lord Brooke's house.^ He knew of his later revision of his 
poems and criticised it in such a way as to show his thorough knowledge 
of what was done; and Lord Brooke's influence upon him has been 
traced in his thought. Davenant, moreover, showed great respect for 
both Daniel's theory and his practice in poetry. Is it unnatural to 
think that the pattern of these masters influenced him in his use of 
rhyme in dignified drama? If not, then the indirect influence of these 
writers upon the Heroic Drama of the Restoration follows ; for Dryden 
justly called Davenant the father of the Heroic Drama.' At all events, 
there seems to be little room for doubt that Davenant shows the effect 
of Greville's instruction in his application of literary art to the illus- 
tration of political morality and philosophy; he may also have learned 
from Greville the possibilities of themes from Oriental history for this 
purpose; and both of these are lines of development that lead to the 
Heroic Drama. 

Two plays of Greville's are extant. He wrote a third, the fate of 
which he describes thus : 

Lastly, concerning the Tragedies themselves; they were in their first crea- 
tion three; Whereof Antonie and Cleopatra, according to their irregular pas- 
sions, in forsaking Empire to follow sensuality, were sacrificed to the fire. 
The executioner, the author himselfe. Not that he conceived it to be a contemp- 
tible younger brother to the rest: but lest while he seemed to looke over much 
upward, hee might stumble intxj the Astronomers pit. Many members in that 
creature (by the opinion of those few eyes, which saw it) having some childish 



* Dr. Lester places these three among the plays in the French form. 

* See Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. by Andrew Clark, 2 vols., Oxford, 1898, I, 
p. 204. 

*In his Of Heroic Plays, 1672. He says also: "For Heroic Plays (in 
which only I have used it [rhymed verse] without the mixture of prose) the 
first light we had of them, on the English theatre, was from the late Sir 
William D'Avenant." Essays of Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols., 1900; I, p. 149. 



36 The Works of Fulke Greville 

wantonnesse in them, apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating 
of vices in the present Governors, and government. 

From which cautious prospect, I bringing into my minde the ancient 
Poets metamorphosing mans reasonable nature into the sensitive of beasts, or 
vegetative of plants; and knowing these all (in their true morall) to bee but 
images of the unequall ballance between humours and times; nature, and 
place. And again in the practice of the world, seeing the like instance not 
poetically, but really fashioned in the Earle of Essex then falling; and ever till 
then worthily beloved, both of Queen, and people: This sudden descent of such 
greatnesse, together with the quality of the Actors in every Scene, stir'd up the 
Authors second thoughts, to bee carefull (in his owne case) of leaving faire 
weather behind him.^ 

The meaning of this is a little covered up by the characteristic of 
some of Greville's prose which has caused him to be compared, unjustly, 
with Polonius, but it seems to justify the coi^clusion that the play was 
one of those containing disguised comment on the events of Essex' 
disgrace. The conclusion is not indeed on the face of the words, but 
on the other hand it was not the sort of thing which Greville wanted to 
make as plain as a church-steeple. Moreover, unless we adopt this 
opinion we must suppose that Greville's mind was ludicrously dis- 
cursive. He is discussing his own works in order; coming to one of 
the plays, and telling why he destroyed it, he begins without a break, 
where our quotation ends, to give his views on the case of Essex's pun- 
ishment, and to make it clear that he considered it undeserved. Then, 
lest this should be misinterpreted, he adds a long eulogy of Elizabeth's 
government, in his enthusiasm now actually losing sight of his connec- 
tion. At last, after fifty-seven printed pages, he returns to his subject 
as follows: 

Thus have I by the reader's patience, given that Aegyptian and Roman 
tragedy a much more honourable sepulture, then it could ever have deserved.^ 

It seems all but certain that his reason for destroying the play was 
the fear that was occasioned by the strict watch kept on books sup- 
posed to refer to Essex and Elizabeth. The point is of minor impor- 
tance at best, however, in the case of a non-extant play; but this An- 
tonie and Cleopatra is of some further interest, first because it can be 
exactly dated (if the phrase: 'Essex then falling,' is to be literally 
taken) in 1600-01, and secondly because it leaves no writer of this 
Senecan group who did not treat subjects of the period of the beginning 
of the Roman empire. Four of them treated the story of Antony's love. 

Greville himself tells us something also about the two plays he 



Life of Sidney, ed. 1652, pp. 178-9; ed. Grosart, Vol. IV, pp. 155-6. 
Ibid., ed. 1652, p. 235; ed. Grosart, p. 214. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 37 

thought fit to preserve, Alaham and Mustapha, but before quoting what 
he says it will be best to tell what can be known of these plays from 
other sources. They differ from all others of their class in having the 
scene laid in little-known Oriental countries. The advantage of this 
delocalization, as it were, for the purpose of the creation of abstract 
types is evident, but Greville may have had the suggestion for the place 
from the Latin plays of the universities, in which subjects from 
Oriental history were not infrequently used. There is in fact in exist- 
ence one of these plays, called Solymannidae,^ in which the same his- 
torical events are dramatized as in Musiapha. This is not, however, the 
source of Greville's play. Several other possible sources have been 
suggested, only two of which need be discussed here. The first is a 
supplement added to H. Goughe's [or Goffe's] translation (1570) of 
Bartholomaeus Georgievitz' De Turcarum Moribus, The Offspring of 
the House of the Ottomans being the title of tliis translation. The 
title of the supplement is The horrible acte, and wicked offence of 
Soltan Soliman Emperour of the Turkes, in murtheringe his eldest 
Sonne Mustapha, the year of our Lorde 1553. The fact that Daniel, in 
his Defence of Ryme, the work which he says he expanded from a letter 
written to Greville, mentions Georgievitz' book as an authority for 
his Oriental knowledge, leads one to think first of this as Greville's 
source. Dr. J. L. Haney, my fellow-student, examined this book for 
me in the British Museum and made a careful abstract of its contents. 
The second of the possible sources in question is the twelfth book of 
De Thou (Thuanus), Historiae sui temporis, the first part of which 
was published in 1604. Dr. Lester decides that the latter is the source, 
on the ground that here alone the names are as in Greville. He does 
not mention the other and probably therefore had not examined it. 
The names in tliis (Goughe, tr. Georgievitz) too are substantially the 
same as in Greville (Rustanus for Rosten, langir and Giangir for 
Z anger, etc.), and in the case of Greville's Rossa (in De Thou Roxo- 
lana, in Goughe Rosa) even much nearer. The features in which 
Goughe's narrative differs from Greville's are also different in De Thou, 
and these are probably to be explained on the ground that Greville 
modified the well-known story to suit his own purposes. At all events 
if De Thou is, as Dr. Lester supposes, Greville's main source, his sub- 
stitution of the name Rossa for De Thou's Roxolana can only be 



' See an art. in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch XXXIV, die lateinischen Univer- 
sitdts-dramen Englands in der Zeit der Konigin Elizabeth, by Geo. B. Church- 
ill and Wolfgang Keller, pp. 244-6. The authors point out that the Solyman 
of the play is Solyman II, the Great, who ascended the throne of his father 
Selim I in 1520. 



38 The Works of Fulke Greville 

accounted for by his having also used Goughe's supplement to Georgie- 
vitz or some other narrative related to it. 

No source has been discovered for Alaham. The statement of 
Baker that the same story is told in Thomas Herbert's A relation of 
some yeares travailed 1634, though not really bearing on the question, 
has been several times repeated. An examination of the book reveals, 
however, that the story is not there. The narrative intended by Baker 
is probably that on pages 99 and following, in which events immediately 
preceding the accession of the then (1626) reigning sultan are related. 
These events are so like those of Mustapha's murder by his father that 
Herbert, though familiar with the Oriental courts, must in some way 
have confused the two. Baker either was thinking Mustapha when he 
wrote Alaham, or he was deceived by the superficial resemblance of a 
blinding in Herbert's story to the fact of the blinded father in Alaham. 
There seems to be some ground for the conjecture that in Alaham Gre- 
ville made up a typical story out of various Oriental materials, in- 
cluding some of the well-known historical events that he also used in 
Mustapha. The great similarity of the characters and their relations 
to each other in the two plays is elsewhere pointed out, and the suppo- 
sition that Greville is here adapting typical incidents from a variety of 
sources is further supported by their exact fitness to illustrate in detail 
his political philosophy as illustrated in the Treatises. He himself in 
a Chorus of Alaham describes exactly the abstraction each character is 
meant to represent. As to the picturesque detail of the drama, it seems 
traceable to a number of sources. The position of the heroine, whose 
name ' Caelica' suggests invention after an abstract idea, is strikingly 
similar to that of Antigone. The blind old king seems to be a rem- 
iniscence of the blind king of Paphlagonia in the Arcadia.^ Further, 
the details of the poisoned shirt by which Cain dies and the concealment 
of the old king under the funeral pyre have parallels in classic legend 
and the plays of Seneca. 

Of the two extant dramas, Alaham was first published in the Folio 
of 1633, and external evidence concerning its composition is almost 
wanting. Mustapha, however, was surreptitiously printed in 1609, and 
if the work of De Thou is a principal source of the play we have its 
early limit as 1604, since it is not likely that the work of this foreign 

^ A relation of some years travaile, begunne Anno 1626. London, 1634. 
In 1638 Herbert published an enlarged version of his work, with the title Some 
yeares travel, but this, though containing some new particulars of the Mus- 
tapha story, adds nothing concerning Alaham. See Baker's Biog. Dram. 

^ For the suggestion of the first of these points I am indebted to Prof. 
Schelling; for the second to a manuscript note by Miss Isabel Graves, author 
of an unpublished thesis on Sidney's Arcadianism. 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 39 

scholar would have come into Greville's hands before it was printed. 
This evidence falls in with the fact that from James' accession GreviUe 
lived in retirement until 1614, and, by his own account, occupied his 
leisure in study. Of less certain value is the fact that Mustapha is 
written in a spirit of opposition to tyranny and apprehension of its 
effects, which is not shown in the same way in Alaham and which 
corresponds very well with his discontent with " those new revolutions 
of time," as he calls them, in the early years of James' reign. ^ So 
unequivocal were many of the expressions and whole passages of this 
kind in the 1609 Quarto that in preparing the play later for the col- 
lected edition of his works GreviUe cancelled the most dangerous of 
them,^ possibly fearing to encourage the spirit of rebellion which was 
then abroad, possibly too because he understood the force of censorship 
under Laud. 

Mustapha roughly placed, we turn to the internal evidence concern- 
ing Alaham. In discussing the Sotmets we spoke of the use of feminine 
lines as an indication of the time of writing of the various parts of the 
sequence, and a similar test is of service in the dramas. In Alaham, 
as we have said, there are exceedingly few feminine lines, the average 
falling even below that of the middle group of sonnets : one in the first 
act, four in the second, and so on. So marked is the absence of them, 
in fact, that in a poet who in general shows a fondness for the hendeca- 
syllabic it is a sign of conscious avoidance in deference to a theory, 
and we have found the explanation of it in the parallel practice of 
Daniel and the statement he made concerning it. It was in 159-4 or 
1595 that Daniel, on a suggestion, as he says, by a friend, began the 
consistent omission of eleven-syllable lines in poems generally deca- 
syllabic, and since he was then doubtless discussing the subject in 
conversation, it is possible that GreviUe at this time or soon after put 
the principle in practice in Alaham. This however is only a possi- 
bility. In Mustapha we have a different practice, both a general in- 
crease, though not very great, in the number of eleven-syllable lines 
and the definitely marked use of such lines, wholly or prevailingly, in 
certain scenes and passages,^ a practice parallel with that of the latter 
part of the Caelica cycle. 

^ Life of Sidney, Grosart edition, IV, p. 215. 

* See the Appendix to Vol. Ill of Grosart's edition, where the outspoken 
passages cancelled later are given, from a manuscript at Warwick Castle. 

* The following are the scenes and passages in question : 

I, 1. 129 lines; 41 of 11 syllables, almost all occurring in groups of 
from four to thirteen lines. 
II, I. 83 lines; 35 of 11 syllables, arranged as follows: 20 in first 25 
lines, 3 in next 39, 12 in last 19. 



40 The Works of Fulke Greville 

That Alaham is at least an earlier play than MustapJia seems to be 
shown also by the evidence of style. Mr. Gosse says that " MustapJia 
has less rhyme introduced into it than Alaham, and has a somewhat 
more modern air." ^ The former of these statements is not borne out 
by a comparison, but the latter must be confirmed by the impression of 
every reader, and a careful examination shows some of the elements 
that go to produce this more ' modern' effect. In the first place, though 
both of the plays are strangely formal in style, in Alaham there is much 
greater use of rhetorical devices. These are principally rhetorical 
questions, antitheses, and apothegms, or " sentences," as they were then 
called. Argument is carried on almost exclusively by these means; 
even narrative advances in a series of rhetorical queries and maxims 
couched in a formal antithetic style; and the long monologues are in 
a kind of stychomythy of one. Though these assembled fragments of 
discourse are full of profound meaning, the mind wearies of the con- 
strained and interrupted method of progression, and attention flags in 
the effort to unite the parts of the story. There is probably no play in 
the language in wliich it is harder to understand continuously what 
happens than Alaham. These characteristics are not all peculiar to 
Alaham, it is true, but in Mustapha they are considerably modified, 
and relieved by scenes in which syntax is continuous and argument 
moves naturally forward. All of the soliloquy of Achmat, Act II, 
Scene 1, is a case in point, and particularly the first 50 lines, in which 
there is neither a break in the grammatical connection, nor an inter- 
ruption of the flow of thought; and an example in narrative style is 
the story of the murder of Mustapha told by Achmat to Zanger in V, 3. 
Apart from these characteristics of style, Mustapha is intellectually 
both more forceful and more simple than Alaham. Not only do the 
characters speak their feelings with less exaggeration and rhetorical 
* gesture,' but more of the author's own emotion is in his thought, 
fusing it and reducing it to more natural forms. The figures are less 
rigid and monstrous, and the effect of the play is somewhat less like 
that of archaic sculpture. There is a difference, again, in the treat- 
ment of the subjects. In Alaham all the follies of public life are 
exposed impartially ; but in Mustapha the tyranny of kings and priests 
is denounced with special earnestness. The hypocrisy of the church, 

II, 3. A long scene with very few eleven-syllable lines except that 7-28 

and 39-53 are all such. 
V, 1. 17 lines; all eleven-syllable. 
V, 2. 102 lines; 68 eleven-syllable. 
These, as has been pointed out, are all passages of heightened emotion, 
unless possibly I, 1 be an exception. 
^Jacobean Poets, p. 200. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 41 

which had been only vaguely hinted in Alaham, is revealed in every 
word of the Priest, with evident feeling on the author's part, and the 
play ends with the Chorm Quintus which won for Greville the titles 
* impious' and ' skeptic' from some readers. It has already been pointed 
out that the denunciation of the church is a feature of the last group 
of sonnets, and of those alone, and in this respect, as well as in style, 
Mustapha seems to correspond with this part of the sequence, as Alaham 
does with the sonnets of the middle group, written, as we think, between 
1586 and 1600. 

The following is Greville's account of his plays : ^ 

Now to return to the Tragedies remaining, my purpose in them was, not 
(with the Ancient) to exemplifie the disastrous miseries of mans life, where 
Order, Lawes, Doctrine, and Authority are unable to protect Innocency from 
the exorbitant wickednesse of power, and so out of that melancholike Vision, 
stir [up] horrour, or murmur against Divine Providence: nor yet (with the 
Moderne) to point out Gods revenging aspect upon every particular sin, to the 
despaire, or confusion of mortality; but rather to trace out the high waies of 
ambitious Grovernours, and to shew in the practice, that the more audacity, 
advantage, and good successe such Soveraigntiea have, the more they hasten to 
their owne desolation and ruine. 

So that to this abstract end, finding all little instruments in discovery of 
great bodies to be seldome without errours, I presumed, or it rather escaped 
me, to make my Images beyond the ordinary stature of excesse. . . . 

Againe, for the Arguments of these Tragedies they be not naked, and 
casuall, like the Greeke, and Latine, nor (I confesse) contrived with the variety, 
and unexpected encounters of the Italians, but nearer Level'd to those humours, 
councels, and practices, wherein I thought fitter to hold the attention of the 
Reader, than in the strangeness or perplexedness of witty Fictions; in which 
the affections, or imagination, may perchance find exercise, and entertainment, 
but the memory and judgement no enriching at all; Besides, I conceived these 
delicate Images to be over-abundantly furnished in all Languages already. 

Then follows the comparison between Sidney's writings and his own 
already quoted. 

. . . And if in this ordaining, and ordering matter, and forme together for 
the use of life, I have made theis Tragedies, no plaies for the stage, be it known, 
it was no part of my purpose to write for them, against whom so many good, 
and great spirits have already written. 

The "high waies of ambitious governours" form the main subject 
of the Tragedies, but the folly of human desires would more nearly 
indicate the scope of their thought. The plans of the two plays are 
very similar. In each a weak tyrant occupies the throne, and the 
events illustrate the evils described as peculiar to that case in the 

' Life of Sidney, ed. Grosart, pp. 220-3 ; ed. 1652, pp. 242 S. 



42 The Works of Fulke GreviUe 

Treatise of Monarchy. In each case the most dangerous plotter is a 
woman who tries to alter the succession in the interest of her own son. 
In each there is a representative of the organized church, and two 
representatives of the faults of the nobility, and a daughter of the 
wronged king whose virtues are a foil to the mad vices of the other 
woman of the play. Finally, there is one good man in each, a coun- 
sellor of state; Mahomet Basha, in Alaham, seems to be such a char- 
acter, but he is hazily represented and soon disappears from the scene ; 
the aged counsellor Achmat in Mustapha is the one clearly-drawn 
representative of political virtue and wisdom in the plays, and it is 
interesting to observe that his conduct is exactly that which Greville 
advocates in the Letter to an Honorable Lady. He takes no part in 
the strife, and belongs to no party; he argues that the evils of the 
time offer no latitude for noble action, and finds his duty in ' bearing 
nobly.' It is he that reports the rising of the people at the end of the 
play and debates the significant question whether duty is on the side 
of obedience to authority or on the side of rebellion — with the con- 
clusion that both are forms of folly and that the only wisdom is 
patience. He is a kind of Seneca, a representative of the Stoic wisdom, 
and clearly the projection of the author's own moral philosophy. 

It is apparent that Greville's plays are intellectual in a different 
sense from all the other plays of the time. Daniel and Sir William 
Alexander induce abstract morality and philosophy from the particular 
cases they consider; Greville deduces character and all but the main 
outlines of the story from abstract thought. Greville's are therefore 
philosophical dramas in the exact sense, in the same sense in which 
Goethe's Faust and Browning's Bordello are philosophical, and it fol- 
lows that they must be criticised in a different way from the other 
plays in the same form. We may wonder at other poets of the Eliza- 
bethan age who from no other motive than literary snobbishness pre- 
ferred the outgrown Senecan form to the living drama of their day, 
but we cannot object to the use of such a form for the drama of philoso- 
phy. The fact that it is fixed in the mould of honorable disuse is its 
qualification for this service. 

Again, there is some interest in remarking the peculiar fitness of 
Greville's thought for the dramatic mode of exposition. His interest 
in the strife of parties in the world, like that of Achmat in his play, 
is the observer's, and not the participant's. His belief in the depravity 
of man is not a theological convention, but a conviction which he 
carried into every field of thought and applied with a consistency of 
which few Calvinists can boast. His love for his unregenerate fellow- 
men has no other expression therefore than the counsel to repress their 
natural desires that they may suffer as little ill from them as possible ; 



The Works of Fulke Greville 43 

and his method of illustrating this counsel in his plays is to create a 
number of types, each illustrating a ruling passion of men, endow 
them with a kind of personality, and impartially allow them to work 
out their own destruction together. The \'irtuous character, who should 
resist these errors and serve as a dramatic foil to them, is absent in 
these plays, or present only as passive victim or as spectator. Gre- 
ville's very method, in short, is steeped in the Stoic irony of his thought, 
and if we substitute for the blind power of fate the blind law of human 
depravity, the similarity, which he himself notes, between the Greek 
tragedies and his own plays of Calvinistic pessimism is apparent. The 
method has the disadvantage, however, of obscurity. We believe, for 
instance, that Caelica, the daughter of the old king in Alaham, is a 
type of perfection, until we read in one of the Choruses that she repre- 
sents an error to which good souls are liable, the error of proud re- 
sistance to the overwhelming evils of the world; and almost all Gre- 
ville's readers have been misled because in the famous Chorus Quintus 
of Mustapha he left them to discover if they might that both the 
speakers represent forms of error. Greville has been repeatedly charged, 
on the ground of this Chorus, with the atheistical tendency which he 
exhibits, by the dramatic method, as a characteristic of his Moham- 
medan priests. This instance, indeed, is not within the dramatic 
action, but the Chorus itself is in dramatic form and it illustrates the 
obscurity in the plays due to the fact that the errors are controverted 
by other errors and not by the contrast with right. Greville, in short, 
has required more subtlety of puppets than puppetry is capable of. 

The Choruses are not the least interesting parts of the plays, but 
their character is better illustrated by the discussion of the Treatises 
than by that of the plays themselves. They have the advantage over 
most of the Treatises, however, of subjects that reveal Greville's greatest 
qualities. A strife of words between bands of Good and Bad Spirits 
raises questions of human life and conduct to a sphere of infinite great- 
ness, and a debate between Time and Eternity justifies the splendid 
expectations raised by its title. The eternal truths which find no place 
in the interplay of errors in the action of the dramas are vindicated in 
these choruses, and as the plays themselves show Greville's knowledge 
of the world, these show that he had the power to give imaginative 
reality to the spiritual ideals from which the world is sadly divorced. 



Ill 

THE TREATISES 

The Folio edition of ' Lord Brooke's Works/ published in 1633, 
contained, besides the Sonnets and the Plays and the two Letters, the 
following works : A Treatie of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon 
Fame and Honour and A Treatie of Warres. For some reason, perhaps 
because its political teaching would have been thought dangerous in 
the period between 1628 and 1640, Greville's largest work was not in- 
cluded in this volume, and in 1670 another volume appeared, contain- 
ing A Treatise of Monarchy in fifteen sections, 664 stanzas, and A 
Treatise of Religion.^ The external evidence concerning the date of 
these works is contained in Greville's statement that they were written 
with the intention of distributing them among the plays in the form 
of choruses, and that their disproportionate length for this purpose 
was due to his " apprehensive youth" wanting " a well touched com- 
passe." ^ We have the same difficulty here that confronts us in all 
general references to age by the writers of the time. Looking backward 
from an age of perhaps seventy he might refer to the time when he 
was forty-five as his " apprehensive youth." The internal evidence 
seems to be more satisfactory; for, in the first place, there are men- 
tions of Queen Elizabeth showing that she was dead at the time they 
were written,^ secondly, an allusion to the excommunication of the 
State of Venice, which occurred in 1606,* and, finally, mention of the 
" late Fourth Henry," of France, who was assassinated in 1610.^ 

Unfortunately some doubt is thrown upon this evidence by the fact 
that Greville revised all his works in the latter part of his life and 
that this one, the Treatise of Monarchy, passed by his own account 
through several transformations. Taking up his "bear-whelp" again, 
he says, to lick it, he first cast it " into that hypocriticall figure Ironia," 
and then again, fearing it would seem light and irreverent, " forced 
in examples of the Koman gravity and greatnesse." ^ Dr. Grosart 
further confused the matter by some careless editing. In Volume IV 
of his edition, he gives an account of certain MSS. of Lord Brooke 

^ The Remains of Sir Fulk Qrevill Lord Brooke, London, 1670. See Grosart 
ed., Vol. I. 

^Life of Sidney, ed. 1652, pp. 173-4; ed. Grosart, IV, p. 150. 

*A Treatise of Monarchy, st. 406. 

•lb., St. 214. 

" lb., St. 430. 

^Life of Sidney, ed. 1652, p. 176; ed. Grosart, IV, p. 154. 

44 



The Works of Fulke Greville 45 

preserved at Warwick Castle and sent to him for examination after 
he had published part of his edition. He describes and collates these 
MSS. fully. Of the volume containing the Treatise of Monarchy he 
says that it is written by a scribe, but contains corrections by the 
author in his owti hand. The corrections are in details and expression, 
not in arrangement, omission, or addition, and the MS. must have been 
made after the larger alterations referred to by Greville. Yet Dr. 
Grosart says that "the corrections must have been made when our 
Worthy was young, corresponding as they do with his handwriting 
while still Mr. Fulke (or Foulke) Greville." This means that before 
1597 Greville had already completed and had made corrections in a 
MS. containing mention of the "late Fourth Henry'' of France; for 
this stanza is in the MS. in its present form and in the same hand 
with the rest, as are also the allusions to Queen Elizabeth and the 
excommunication of Venice. Something surely is wrong with Dr. 
Grosart's distinction between the early and the late penmanship of 
Lord Brooke. We can say with assurance concerning this MS., that it 
was made after 1610 and that it afterward received more than one 
revision from the author. Concerning the date of the writing of the 
treatise in which these allusions occur, the natural opinion is that 
they are safe guides; both the number of them and their naturalness 
in their connection make it probable that the passages in which they 
occur were written at the same time with the rest of the treatise, and 
that the whole poem therefore was written during Greville's period of 
retirement during the first ten years of the reign of James. The fact 
that they were intended as choruses of the tragedies is further evidence 
for this dating; for, as we have seen, Mvstapha can be placed with 
certainty between 1604 and 1608. There are no indications of date in 
the other treatises, but they were all written in the maturity of the 
author's thought. The Treatie of Warres is a pendant of the Treatise 
of Monarchy; and the other three, on Fame, Learning, and Religion, 
are bound together by a similar method of treating the various subjects! 
The ironical contrast between practical wisdom and real truth char- 
acteristic of Greville's thought forms the basis of a dual division of the 
subject-matter of each of these treatises. They were evidently written 
during the same period of their author's life, and that, we may con- 
jecture, a later period than is represented in any other whole work of 
his hand. They have, in common with those later sonnets c^f which we 
have spoken, greater fervor and spontaneity of utterance, both in the 
denunciation of the 'atheism' of churchmen and in the assertion of 
the true ideals of God's elect, than is to be found in any of the earlier 
sonnets or in the plays. 

Their character and relations with other works of the time. Gre- 



46 The Works of Fulke GreviUe 

ville calls his work ^ on monarchy a changeling, both because of its 
deformities and because it was stolen from the Tragedies which gave it 
birth; and he gives a very particular account of its composition and 
various revisions, the gist of which is apparently an apology for the 
confusion between the words king and tyrant in certain parts of the 
work, — ^truly a dangerous kind of error. He says that having well 
"weigh'd the tendernesse of that great subject; . . . but especially 
the danger, by treading aside, to cast scandall upon the sacred founda- 
tions of Monarchy, a new counsell rose up in him to take away all 
opinion of seriousnesse from these perplexed pedegrees; and to this 
end carelessly cast them into that hypocriticall figure Ironia, wherein 
commonly men — to keep above their works — seeme to make toies of the 
uttermost they can doe." He returns to this apologetic tone in the 
next paragraph : " and like a man that plaies divers parts upon severall 
hints, [I] left all the indigested crudities, equally applied to kings or 
tyrants." 

The confusion of which Greville speaks does in fact exist in the 
Treatise ; the obscurity which most perplexes one in reading it is differ- 
ent from what is caused by condensed expression and close thought, or 
rather is in addition to this; it is obscurity due to a difference of 
method between the first and the second half of the work. The irony 
which Greville tries to pass off as mere trifling is all to be found in 
the sections 1-5 of the Treatise, which treat the following subjects: 
Declination of monarchy to violence. Weak-minded tyrants, Cautions 
against these weak extremities. Strong tyrants; and it was this part 
that Greville tried to qualify by his apology, and that did indeed excite 
wonder when it finally appeared because of its popular doctrine.^ In 
the other sections, which are devoted to practical counsels for the 
various branches of government and orders of the commonwealth and 
to the ' Excellency of Monarchy,' Greville's attitude is quite different 
and not reproachable even in a member of the King's Council, but in 
these five he ironically espouses the cause of the tyrant and gives, first 
to the weak tyrant, and secondly to the strong, counsels by which they 
may maintain themselves against their subjects' efforts for freedom. 
He uses 'tyrant' in the present bad sense, and affects to be oblivious 
of the fact that all kings are not in this sense tyrants. It is evident 
that this part of his work, sections 1-5, is what Greville meant by 

^ He says : " that Treatise intitled the Declination of Monarchy," which 
is the name of one section of the Treatise of Monarchy; but the name properly 
describes the character of all the first half of the work ( see below ) . 

' Richard Baxter marvelled that it should have been ' allowed in this age.' 
Poetical Fragments, 1681, Prefatory Address. Reprinted in Brydges' Restituta, 
III, pp. 187-8. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 47 

" that Treatise intitled the Declination of Monarchy," and the differ- 
ence in point of view between this and the rest of the Treatise can be 
explained by the fact that these parts were written independently of 
the rest for use in particular choruses of the plays. 

There is another explanation of the peculiar cynicism of these 
sections, which Greville does not mention. A comparison shows that 
in these parts, but not markedly in others, he was following The Prince 
of Machiavelli.^ The parallels are particularly close in the fifth sec- 
tion, Of Strong Tyrants, in which some of Machiavelli's familiar dicta 
are repeated with new illustrations: that princes must be neither 
contemptible nor odious (stanza 153), that pleasing vices are more 
useful than austere virtues (152), that a weak prince may find it 
useful to nourish factions in his realm in "mild times" (184). One 
of Machiavelli's precepts, however, Greville, writing for an English 
public, cannot approve even as a counsel of selfish wisdom, namely his 
famous rule that princes need not keep their promises.^ "For what 
gains Power," he asks, " by loss of reputation ?" 

Since every blossome that ill-doing bears 
Blasteth the fruit of good successe with feara.* 

The Italian subtlety does not sit well, however, on Greville's shoulders, 
and he returns at the end of this part to his own franker method of 
reasoning, calling bad bad even when his practical counsels take him 
deepest into the mire of policy. Doubtless some sources for other 
parts of the Treatise could be found by patient study, but the literature 
of statecraft is so voluminous in this period that none but a specialist 
in that field can distinguish features of kinship; even Greville's posi- 
tion on the main question at issue in such discussions, the rights of 
the people, has been described in two contradictory ways. The mere 
statement that power is inherent in the governed is not distinctive, 
since it is found in almost all the political philosophers of the time, 
monarchists and democrats, Romanists and Protestants. Greville's 
opinions, however, considering that they are those of a professed mon- 
archist, are often remarkably radical, and we may perhaps discover in 
them the influence of Languet, Sidney's friend and Greville's also, 
who wrote a book of broad democratic tenor in the interest of the 



* The Prince. Morley's Universal Library, London, 1893. 

» Sts. 164-175. 

"Compare st. 93 with The Prince, Chap. IV, p. 93; 115-6 with P. Ch. 
XXV; 121 with P. xxii, p. 145; st. 132 vnth P. xxiii, p. 147; 135-7 with P. xx, 
pp. 131 and 133; 142 with P. p. 39; 149 with P. xv, p. 99; 150, couplet, with 
P. XXV, pp. 155-6. 



48 The Works of Fulke Greville 

French Huguenots.^ A separate chapter on Greville's thought would 
be necessary in order to explain the confusion of opinion about his 
position, and to show what his attitude really was. 

The other treatises, except that Of Warre, which is another treat- 
ment of the subject of one section of the Treatise of Monarchy, are 
connected by the similarity of thought which has been mentioned. All 
that needs to be said about those which treat the subjects of fame and 
religion comes under the head of Greville's thought, but the Treatise 
of Humane Learning has relations with other works of the time which 
give it particular interest. 

The subject of the freedom and the power of the human reason was 
a storm-center of controversy in the Kenaissance period. The interest 
in the subject was natural, and it was inevitable that the differences 
should be bitter; for the age was in the birth-throes of modern art 
and science. In England at the end of the sixteenth century, when 
the imagination had found a new and joyous freedom in lyric, romance, 
and drama, and the intellect was asserting its power in the science of 
Bacon, when a new physiology, a new physics, and a new astronomy 
were urging their claims upon men's minds, the controversy was warm 
in proportion to the amount of the fuel. The public and often violent 
disputes centering about the stage and involving men's thoughts con- 
cerning all of the fine arts, is too well known to be mentioned here, but 
an equally serious debate was going on quietly in the minds of the 
thoughtful and scholarly men of England concerning the validity of 
science and the new independence which the intellect was asserting 
for itself. Four works of the time familiar to students of literature 
argue the question in as many ways : Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum, 
the first part of which is on Human Knowledge, Daniel's Musophilus, 
Bacon's Advancement of Learning, and Greville's Treatie, three of 
them, if not all, written in the decade from 1595 to 1605, and all of 
them illustrating in many interesting ways the intellectual spirit of 
the age. 

The least important for us is the first ' Elegy' of Davies' Nosce 
Teipsum (published in 1599), Of Humane Knowledge.^ Like Pope's 
Essay on Man, it is a popular exposition of current ideas by a man 
who has no distinctive opinions. He argues that all learning is uncer- 
tain and vain except knowledge of self and God, and so far he is at 
one with Greville, but he maintains his argument with the agreeable 
assurance of a ready dialectician rather than with deep conviction. 



* See Biographie Vniverselle (Michaud ), Vol. 22. 

' The Complete Poems of Sir John Dwvies, London, 1876, 2 vols., ed. by Dr. 
Grosart. 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 49 

Daniel's Musophilus, or A Generall Defence of all Learning ^ takes the 
other side of the question, as its title indicates, and has the special link 
with our subject of a dedicatory sonnet to Fulke Greville. This poem 
is a dialogue between Musophilus and one Philocosmus whose interest 
is all in useful learning and the weighty affairs of government. 
Musophilus answers the philosophical arguments of his opponent with 
the happy indifference of one who seeks no further than the finer pleas- 
ures of the world ; his love for the " holy skill" of letters is independent 
alike of Bacon's practical utility and of the moral utility of Greville; 
the intellectual raptures of the scholar and the poet are superior to 
questions of use. 

Soul of the World, Knowledge, without thee 
What hath the world that truly glorious is? 

Daniel had a subject after his own heart in the Musophiltis. His in- 
tellectual refinement, his intelligent, and, as it were, historical appre- 
ciation of the charm of his own time, the qualities which distinguish 
Daniel as eminently the man of letters among the Elizabethan and 
Jacobean poets, are at their best in this poem; and in contrast with 
Greville's moral apprehension its spirit of liberal worldliness furnishes 
a measure of the intellectual range of the age. 

The third of this group of works comes more directly into com- 
parison with Greville's Treatie. The manifesto of the new science, 
Bacon's Advancement of Learning, appeared in 1605, and it is the 
opinion of its recent editor, Mr. W. Aldis Wright, that the first book 
was written in 1603. We know, however, that the materials of which 
it was made up had been in Bacon's mind for many years, and that he 
had previously written them down in other forms; and Greville may 
easily therefore have become acquainted with the contents of the book 
during the years of his intimacy with Bacon, which began before 1594. 
However that may be, it is certain that his Treatie is in part an answer 
to the Advancement, and also in part an echo of it. Greville was inter- 
ested in the studies of Bacon in natural science, and particularly in the 
practical uses to which they might be applied; he was in sympathy 
with Bacon's attacks on the binding power of tradition, and the utili- 
tarian zeal of the great experimenter found an echo in his humanita- 
rian sympathies. He shows in both thought and phrase the deference 
he paid to his writings.- But on the subject of the 'proficienc/ of 

^ Grosart's edition of Daniel. 

' Compare T. of L. 25 and A. of L. ( Works of Bacon, 3 vols. Philada., Vol. 
I) p. 170; T. of L. 39 and A. of L. pp. 162-3; T. of L. 17 and A. of L. 163; 
T. of L. 42-3 and A. of L. p. 164; T. of L. 74 and A. of L. p. 195; T. of L. 75-6 
and A. of L. 172; T. of L. 131 and A. of L. p. 195; T. of L. 135 and A. of L. 
p. 176; T. of L. 142-3-5 and A. of L. p. 174. 



50 The Works of Fulke GreviUe 

learning, the scope of the powers of the mind, he takes issue with him, 
and opposes both empiric and a priori objections to his faith that the 
natural reason can discover unaided the " summary law of nature." 
An answer to Bacon's work in his own time, which is based on the 
argument that Bacon had no metaphysical ground for his science, 
seems to be worthy of more attention than it has received from his- 
torians of philosophy.^ 



^ The neglect of Greville's philosophical writings by specialists in early 
English philosophy is probably due to his having written in verse; this treatise 
on learning accuses it, however, as an unjustifiable timidity or prejudice. 



IV 

THE PROSE WORKS 

Greville's writings in prose include, first, a letter of advice to his 
cousin Greville Varney concerning the proper use of his opportunities 
of travel, dated Hackney, the 20th of November, 1609, an unimportant 
piece concerning which no more need be said; secondly, A Letter to 
an Honourable Lady, a long, yet unfinished, discourse printed in the 
Folio of 1633; and thirdly, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, written 
for the collected edition of his works which Greville arranged for 
posthumous publication, but for some reason not included in the Folio 
volume of 1633.^ It was published in a separate volume of 247 pages 
in 1652 under the somewhat misleading title. The Life of the Renowned 
Sr. Philip Sidney, with an Epistle Dedicatory to the Countess of Sun- 
derland (Waller's * Sacharissa') signed by one P. B. 

It is a curious fact that few professed men of letters in the Eliza- 
bethan and Jacobean periods made literary successes of their prose 
efforts. After The Shepheardes Calender poetry remained for many 
years the natural language of the literature of delight. Donne, for 
example, who had power equal to Swift's, and as complete a mastery of 
worldly wisdom, is forgotten as a prose litterateur although he wrote 
two remarkable works of a satirical and speculative character in that 
medium; and Greville's one effort in formal prose, the Letter just 
mentioned, has attracted little more attention than is bestowed on a 
curiosity of literary history. This work must indeed always have been 
a curiosity, and it is curious to the point of ludicrousness if the 
opinion of Dr. Grosart, that it is addressed to a real lady, is correct. 
Dr. Grosart does not doubt that it was written for Lady Rich, Sidney's 
* Stella,' in answer to a request from her for counsel in her marital 
troubles. But unhappily the facts of Penelope Devereux's married life 
would have to be very different to suit the case of this abused martyr- 
wife, who knows and has known no love but for her faithless husband. 
The fact is, notwithstanding some details that seem remarkably minute, 
that this is in all probability a philosophical epistle suggested by 
similar works of Roman moralists. Plutarch might have given the 
idea of the form to Greville, or, as is more probable, it is another sign 
of his admiration of his political and literary hero, Seneca, whose 
letters were only less popular than his plays among the educated people 
of the time. The facts of the lady's life are an invention of Greville's 

^The Short Speech for Bacon (Grosart, IV, pp. 327-9) may be disregarded. 

51 



52 The Works of Fulke GreviUe 

to illustrate what he thought was the case of the pure soul in an evil 
world ; and by a strange kind of parallelism, these sad domestic events 
are made to represent at the same time the conditions to which an 
upright statesman is exposed in an age of tyranny and corruption. 
The work is in fact an attempt in another literary form at the 
same object attained in the dramas, philosophical exposition by means 
of concrete figures and in a formal artistic guise ; and it illustrates not 
less remarkably the subtlety of Greville's mind in this kind of exercise. 
As to its philosophic teachkig, it deserves more attention — as do Gre- 
ville's other works — than students of philosophy, repelled by its amateur 
form, have accorded it. It supplements the negative teaching of the 
plays, and reveals that Greville's principles were those of the extreme 
form of Stoicism. Sejanus and Brutus for taking arms against the 
troubles of their times are condemned as examples of folly. Seneca, 
in politics, Octavia, in domestic life, are the true heroes of an evil age 
and an evil world, because they had the supreme virtue of "bearing 
well," and living their true lives detached. The doctrine of detachment 
is carried to a point where it is hard to distinguish it from the non- 
resistance of Quakerism; and it is interesting to note a tradition due 
to Davenant that Greville believed a kind of Quakerism would be the 
final settlement of religion in England. 

The Life of Sidney is one of those works, like Lord Herbert's Auto- 
biography and Izaak Walton's Lives, in which the authors have thrown 
aside formal rules of literary composition to give a familiar account of 
events and characters of personal interest to them and their times. 
They illustrate the uncritical character of the biographical essay of the 
time and its license as to digression and inclusion; but they are live 
and direct records of loyal enthusiasm or frank human nature, and 
later ages have enjoyed them for their humanity and profited by their 
essential truthfulness. This work was written very near the end of 
Lord Brooke's life, when he could speak of all his other writings as the 
work of his inexperienced youth, probably twenty years after the death 
of Elizabeth and forty years after the skirmish at Zutphen. Though 
written as a dedication to "that Worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long 
since departed," it is in fact a historical work consisting of several 
parts. It contains, first, an encomium of Sidney, an account of his 
diplomatic activity, a narrative of other events in his life in which 
Greville was associated, and of his death ; ^ secondly, a temperate vindi- 
cation of Essex ; ^ thirdly, a review of Elizabeth's policy ; ^ and, fourthly, 



Grosart's edition, IV, pp. 1-145; ed. 1652, pp. 1-166. 
lb., pp. 157-182; ed. 1652, pp. 181-207. 
lb., pp. 183-214; ed. 1652, pp. 208-235. 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 53 

an account of Greville's own works. ^ The Life is in fact Greville's 
historical legacy, and it contains the salvage of an important work 
which, as he tells us, he began, but never carried to completion. In 
the years of his private life after the accession of James, when his 
dissatisfaction with the government kept him out of active political 
service, he decided to find occupation in writing a life of Elizabeth. 
He planned his history from the beginning of the Tudor dynasty 
through the reign of the Queen, and applied to the Secretary, the 
younger Cecil, for access to the documents. The Cecils had little 
liking for Greville, and he no more for them than a loyal friend of 
Essex was likely to have; and the Secretary, fearing what such a 
writer might make of certain events still fresh in memory, put barriers 
in the way of his use of the records which made Greville give up the 
plan. The review of the policy of Elizabeth in the latter part of the 
Life is his substitute for this unfinished, or projected, history. 

There is none of Lord Brooke's writings that we should more regret 
to lose than this one. It is the source of the classical story of Sidney's 
death, which Greville tells with quaint and pathetic circumstantiality, 
and with the realism in physical details which was natural rather than 
grotesque to the feeling of the age ; it is the best likeness of the young 
" president of learning and chivalry" which has been left us by a con- 
temporary ; it gives a view of the Essex case which is equally creditable 
to the author and to the subject of it ; and it is a remarkable testimony 
by an experienced statesman to the greatness of Elizabeth's govern- 
ment. All these things give it documentary interest, but as a memorial 
of friendship it is worthy of a place among the classics of human 
history. There was no title Greville desired more than that which 
Walpole gave him with a smile, " satellite of Sidney ;" he showed that 
he envied that title in his sonnets; in the Elegy, which Lamb's intuition 
ascribed to Greville's hand ; in some letters, happily preserved, written 
soon after the news of Sidney's death ; in the plans of which we read in 
another letter twenty-five years after Sidney's death, for a monument 
of " touch" with four pillars of solid brass, to cover a common tomb 
for himself and his friend in St. Paul's Cathedral; and in the actual 
inscription on his tombstone in St. Mary's Church in Warwick : ' Friend 
of Sir Philip Sidney'.^ He wrote, therefore, with the sincerity of a 

•Grosart's edition, pp. 146-157 and 214-219; ed. 1652, pp. 167-180, 235-247. 

' The following letter, written to Archibald Douglas, the Scottish ambas- 
sador at London, two months after the news of Sidney's death, speaks for itself: 

1586 (Oct.). My Lord, — I go no whither, therefore I beseech you pardon 
me that I visit you not. The only question I now study is whether weeping 
sorrow, or speaking sorrow, may most honour his memory, that I think death 
is sorry for. What he was to God, his friends and country, fame hath told. 



54s The Works of Fulke Greville 

life-long devotion when he inscribed these "toyes and pamphlets" to 
his memory, " as monuments of true affection between us ; whereof 
(you see) death hath no power." The Life is a work besides to win 
admiration by its own literary qualities. It contains a number of pas- 
sages written with remarkable vividness and power of description, in 
particular Greville's audience with William of Orange, Elizabeth's 
attempts to prevent Greville from engaging in foreign adventure, and 
the story of Sidney's campaign in the Netherlands before his death; 
almost every page has instances of Greville's peculiar eloquence of 
phrase; and the whole work commands admiration as an archaic but 
noble expression of the same spirit of chivalry that animated Sidney 
and Spenser, with an added touch of pathos derived from the char- 
acter of its author and the sadder times through which he survived. 

These two works have a technical interest as examples of the prose 
style of their period which the literary historian dares not disregard. 
But he finds the same difficulties in attempting to speak instructively 
of their qualities as prose literature that are encountered by all critics 
who attempt to deal seriously with the prose of the century before the 
Restoration. Whether or not it is due to the vagueness inherent in the 
subject, the fact is apparent that the intelligent generalizations which 
are the object of literary history have not been made in this field of 
study, except for certain formalists who are easily classified. This 
condition is apparent for example in the comments of the various 
writers in Mr. Henry Craik's recent anthology, and is strikingly illus- 
trated in the discussion of Greville himself. We read there the follow- 
ing sentence : " In him appears the beginning of that strange inability 
to confine oneself to a simple sentence which, not apparent at all in 
much earlier work, seems to have come upon Englishmen in the reign 
of Elizabeth, and from which they hardly got free till the reign of 
William the Third." It is not necessary to controvert a statement in 
which works written well on in the reign of James are considered as 
the first examples of a fault that appeared in the reign of Elizabeth. If 
Greville is the first, what shall be said of Raleigh ? In this deliverance, 
moreover. Professor Saintsbury is justified by only one of the two prose 



though his expectation went beyond her good. My Lord, give me leave to join 
with you in praising and lamenting him, the name of whose friendship carried 
me above my own worth, and I fear hath left me to play the ill poet in my own 
part. Well, my Lord, divide me not from him, but love his memory, and me in 
it. I shall not see your lordship so oft as I would do if you were yourself. It 
is enough I wish you honour and love you. From my lodge this night. Your 
lordship's friend, Foulk Grevill. 

P.S. — I was but gone to take air in the park when it pleased you to call. 
— Hist. MSli}. Comm., as above. 



The Works of Fulke Greville 55 

works of Greville, the Life of Sidney, written very late in his life, pos- 
sibly in the reign of Charles. In this personal record, the memoirs, as 
it professes to be, of an old man, the privilege of discursiveness is 
indeed assumed and abused. It has already been noticed that the dis- 
cussion of Essex' case is a digression of fifty pages in an account of 
Greville's own works. And in paragraphs and sentences there is the 
same looseness of structure. Clauses, explanatory and parenthetic, 
accumulate and are developed to elaborate climaxes, which exhaust the 
force that should carry the sentence on to completion, and progress is 
resumed with an " and so, I say." But it is careless reading that does 
not show the direct contrast in these respects between the Life and the 
Letter. In the formal epistle Greville is under the authority of a liter- 
ary convention not less exacting than the Senecan play or the sonnet. 
He lays out at the beginning a logical plan to which he adheres so 
faithfully that we are able to say that the work, though unfinished, 
was nearing completion. The sentences too are not only planned, but 
are constructed with rigid formality. So far from being loose and licen- 
tious, the character of this prose, the quality that we must distinguish 
it by, is that of a highly artificial and regulated product. 

" The want of fluency and ease" is the special defect that Professor 
Saintsbury notes as the offset to the merits of Greville's prose. The 
quality he describes thus is indeed notably present in it, but when he 
characterizes it as a defect " natural to a language which was hardly 
yet out of leading-strings, but endeavouring at independence," he 
seems to fall into error through an imperfection — for the nonce — of 
historical sympathy. To say that Greville wrote without fluency and 
Sidney artificially because of incapacity in themselves or their mother- 
tongue is hardly nearer the real truth of the matter than to say that 
they wore swords and embroidered garments because they had nothing 
else to wear. For Greville's prose and the prose of the Arcadia, with 
all their differences, fall in the same general class, namely prose deliber- 
ately fashioned and unsimple, and adapted to the requirements of a 
courtly skill. A style developed as a courtly or amateur accomplishment 
is usually marked by idiotisms and extravagances. It is never a con- 
venient work-a-day costume. It is ' costly' and splendid, with peculiar 
refinements and distinguishing ornaments that are commonly not beauti- 
ful in themselves; and its whole effect is lost or turned to absurdity 
unless it is graced by the breeding of the wearer. 

Greville's prose has the characteristics of such a style, and particu- 
larly, of course, those of the courtly taste of his own time, but with an 
archaic preference, it would seem, in works written deep in the Jacobean 
period, for the peculiarities of the courtly style of the period of his 
youth. Analyzed more closely, it reveals several traits that contribute 



56 The Works of Fulke Greville 

to its effect of stateliness, and also to its obscurity. It is enriched with 
adjectives and adverbs that curb and regulate the pace, and tend to 
maintain a uniform stately rhythm in the sentences; secondly, it is 
complexly figurative, or, to be more exact, it is a rich tissue of figures ; 
thirdly, it is marked by intentionally quaint and often very puzzling 
curiosity, or pedantry, of diction; and, fourthly, there is a marked 
tendency to artificial arrangement of phrases, in which parallelism and 
likeness of construction give point to subtle variations and contrasts, 
this being the trait, it will be observed, that most clearly connects it 
with the Arcadianism of Sidney. 

These characteristics are illustrated in the following passages — the 
first a description of the golden age : 

In this estate of mindes, onely gouerned by the vnwritten lawes of Nature, 
you did at the beginning live happily together. Wherein there is a lively image 
of that Golden Age, which the allegories of the poets figure vnto vs. For 
there Equality guided without absolutenesse. Earth yeelded fruit without labour, 
Desert perished in reward, the names of Wealth and Poverty were strange, no 
owing in particular, no private improuing of humors, the traffick being loue 
for loue; and the exchange all for all: exorbitant abundance being neuer 
curious in those selfe-seeking arts, which teare up the bowels of the Earth for 
the priuate use of more than milke and hony.' 

The other illustrates the closeness and mysteriousness of Greville's 
thought, and is a characteristic expression of his philosophy of life. 

Therefore since power lies in him, desire and dutie in you ; pay your tribute, 
doe your homage, and make your reward to bee the secret peace of well-doing; 
cutting oflF all other thoughts of rest by him, who not having it himselfe, cannot 
possibly bestow it vpon others. For by that meanes your honour will bee safely 
guarded from these muddy visions of Hope, which — as I said — is one chiefs 
pillar in incroaching power ; and in which the fooles of the world, sleeping away 
their liberties, doe vainely make Authorities their heires.^ 

Curiosity and intentional indirectness of utterance are obviously 
characteristic of these passages. The description of the monopolists, for 
example, who dig in the earth for " more than milk and honey," owes 
its effect to its calculated strangeness and obscurity, and in another 
place Greville runs still closer into the wind of incomprehensibility when 
he says of monopolists and tyrants that they would " [draw] up our 
brows after our sweat, and [give] laws to thirst as well as drinking.'* 
The figurativeness of his style is also evident. Metaphor, as it is here 
used, is not a means of enlightenment ; nor is it mere ornament in any 
ordinary sense. It is a way of veiling thought to add to its significance, 

^ Works, Grosart ed., Vol. 4, pp. 235-6. 
^ lb., Vol. 4, p. 270. 



The Works of Fulke GreviUe 57 

an appeal to the subtler and more mystical reason, a kind of laby- 
rinthine device guarding the mysteries of truth from indifferent ap- 
proach. These qualities, with the others described above, are not the 
kind of qualities that are due to negligence or immaturity. They are 
plainly characteristics of a courtly style formed in an age in which the 
splendid artifices of chivalry still survived. 

But it is the paradox of Greville's writings that while they are out- 
wardly conventional and rigidly artificial, the personal quality in them 
is subtlety and inwardness of thought ; and the real explanation of the 
strange individuality of his style is to be sought in his own unique 
temperament, which imposed a new character upon the forms and con- 
ventions to which it submitted itself. Undoubtedly something of per- 
sonal defect enters into his strangeness and obscurity. He lacked the 
tact and skill of the expounder, the deftness and facility that still give a 
kind of currency to the superficial Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, 
and the capacity for the " lighter steps of fancy," which completes the 
character of the ' courtier' in Sidney. Looked at with unfriendly eyes, 
the lack of tact and natural lightness, of adaptability to times and con- 
ditions, might seem to be the secret of his personality and of his career, 
as well as of his works. It certainly explains the break with his age 
which withdrew him from public life at the height of his career. But on 
the other hand this deficiency is closely associated with the quality that 
makes him so interesting to those who take the pains to understand 
him. It is the sign of something nobly impractical and unconforming 
in the character of this practical, skeptical statesman. So far as he 
failed in his public career, his failure was due to his devotion, perhaps 
we may say his fantastic devotion, to ideals, and his inability to find in 
the world as it then was any bonds of connection with them. 

A full discussion of Greville's thought would demand more space 
than we can command ; but enough may be briefly indicated to throw 
some light on the personality that informs his writings. The charac- 
teristic trait of his discussion of all subjects of moral and political 
philosophy is the dual division of the subject-matter, due to two distinct 
ways of viewing the same phenomena. He himself makes the division 
and will never allow it to become obscured. One of the two points of 
view is that of the practical statesman or man of the world, and in this 
aspect of his thought Greville is so ironical, so skeptical, that, as we 
have seen, he was confuted by a great ecclesiastic as a free-thinker. 
He scoffed at the notion of special sanctions for monarchs and mon- 
archy ; he scoffed at the " high philosophy," the " guile that is beguiled," 
and refuted Bacon's contention that human reason was capable of dis- 
covering the real laws of nature; and what is more significant in his 
age, he denied to all churches alike, Eoman, Puritan, Anglican, and to 



58 The Works of Fulke Greville 

any possible church, a divine appointment and the right to the alle- 
giance of true souls. In the independence of his views he keeps pace 
with all that is maintained by skeptics like Montaigne as signs of their 
professed character, and he far surpasses them in bitter denunciation of 
the vices of kings and churches. But, on the other hand, Greville is 
not a skeptic. An interesting comparison has been drawn between the 
opinions of Voltaire and Dr. Johnson in their most characteristic works 
to show that their views of the world are not dissimilar ; and Greville's 
irony and gloom are like Johnson's in that they coexist with a positive 
system of beliefs. Johnson, however, stopped his questioning at the 
doors of certain established institutions; while Greville spares nothing 
but the experience of the free individual soul. The positive side of his 
thought appears in the second of the two detached parts into which he 
divides most of his treatises. It is here that he considers truth and 
wisdom as they appear to those whom he calls variously the " real souls," 
the " good," and the " elect," and we have seen in the discussion of the 
Letter what that truth and wisdom seem to him to be. These elect 
have nothing in common with the world but the common fact of 
humanity and the duty of pitying but hopeless service. Their first duty 
is their own spiritual freedom, and this, being wise spirits, they win by 
outward obedience to whatever tyrannical authority is over them ; they 
pay their tribute and seek their peace within, where alone the springs of 
true peace are to be found. Of course this division of the race into 
classes by lines of cleavage visible only to the purely spiritual eye now 
seems to the world somewhat impractical, much too absolute, and de- 
pendent upon personal aberrations of vision ; but it is plain that in Gre- 
ville's case it was a deep personal conviction with its roots in his tem- 
perament and character. We trace both its causes and its effects in the 
dissatisfaction with the world that is the constant note of his letters, in 
the separation from the active spirit of his age that widened as he grew 
older, and in his actual retirement at the age of fifty for a period of 
eleven years. We find too the soil in which this conviction grew in those 
nobler traits of his character that made him a worshipper of heroes, a 
fanciful idealizer of his friends, and a devoted partisan of the past, 
almost, in fact, a dweller in it, as he himself confessed. 

He doubtless felt that his opinions were those of the age of Eliza- 
beth, and he certainly believed them to be in contrast vsdth those of the 
age of James and Charles. But he could not stop the course of time or 
prevent its effects upon his own character. His very attitude of opposi- 
tion, indeed, brings into his thought the qualities of spiritual depth and 
moral concern that belong especially to the seventeenth century, while 
the end at which all his reflection aimed, the spiritual freedom of the. 
individual soul, is the central thought of Puritanism. He has some- 



I 



The Works of Fulke Greville 59 

thing more than the ingenious and subtle depth of the metaphysical 
Jacobeans, and strikes such notes of moral anger and spiritual emotion 
as are heard in the prose works of Milton. It is impossible to read the 
passage in which he describes the moral purpose of his works, in which 
he professes, with astonishing eloquence and the very intonation of 
sincerity, to speak to none on whose foot the Black Oxe of care hath not 
trod, without feeling that we have parted, as Mrs. Ward has said, from 
the age of Sidney and Spenser, and are in the midst of an age far less 
eager and heart-free. 



